R.I.P. Mac Hard Drive

I’ve been using computers since before the Mac. I pair-programmed with my friend Tim on his various Atari computers, mostly watching him make dungeon adventure games. I wrote 100 lines of assembler code using a cartridge on an Odyssey game system. I made a Yahtzee game on an Apple IIe my mom borrowed from her school principal. I collected $5 from various friends to give a Timex Sinclair 1000 to our friend, Bob, as a $60 bargain. Eventually, I talked my parents into getting me an Atari 800XL, which I used from the end of high school into the start of my sophomore year at DePauw.

In 1988, my parents bought me a second-hand Mac—an original 128K version, upgraded to 512K with an external drive and numeric keypad before it found me. The ‘rents paid for it in three installments, totaling $650 … about $1800 less than it retailed when first released in 1984. That machine still sits in a place of honor on my shelf.

All the way up to this current machine (), I have had data problems. I remember bashing a fist into the keyboard, cracking it in the process, in the spring semester of my freshman year at DePauw when it swallowed my creative writing assignment. My early Mac days learned from that. Coupled with very small storage options, I became very good at swapping disks and backing things up. Sure, there were file corruptions and frozen screens that caused data loss, but it wasn’t until I bought a Syquest drive in 1995 that catastrophe was clinically depressing.

I began a freelance company, Real World Creations, in 1996 to serve the web needs local businesses in northern Illinois. The real impetus was (a) I didn’t get a job I was angling for at Tellabs, and (b) I fancied the idea of working for money 4 days a week and writing for fun the other 3. I never did manage to self-organize to that schedule, but in late 1996 I did decide to take time off and write a screenplay (). It didn’t end well, as a BBEdit save problem came right before some drive clicking, and that was all she overwrote. I figured it was Syquest’s fault (it was) and other companies, like Iomega, could do better (they couldn’t). My Jaz drive cropped out on me, leaving about 3GB worth of data trapped. I’ve blocked out all that I lost from that experience, but I’d guess it was more traumatic at the time than it is now. My new catastrophic data loss, though, is very fresh.

Since we didn’t have power last night, I slept soundly clinging to the notion that freezing the drive would allow it to somehow say goodbye with some vital data saves. I spent two hours researching a plan that would optimize my expected window of 20 minutes and get the data I would most miss. Low on the priority were the 6 gigs of iTunes files (all culled from CDs in my possession) and my email archive (which I desperately wanted, but size was probably going to get in the way). Highest were the recent documents written in the last 2-3 weeks, my research directories of hundreds of PDFs, the HCI/d 2 class materials, and un-registering my copy of Final Draft. All was moot, as the only good that came from the morning was the realization that, without the hard drive, the computer would let me eject the CD trapped in the laptop since yesterday.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

There is still the option to manually spin the discs in a clean room. DTI Data is the most attractive company that does this, with a high recovery rate, marketing that promotes a lot of confidence, and a no-data-no-charge policy that makes the gamble risk free. While their prices are also competitive—one flat fee of about $1200 for clean-room work—it is money we just don’t have. I think my lost screenplay is worth that much to me, especially since I never got a chance to re-write it. But for some largely disposable files that cost me time to replace? I just can’t justify it on my lack of salary. So, to MacExperience I go to get the ball rolling on a replacement hard drive instead.

I’m way past the shame-on-me stage of this process. Rather than investing $1200 in file recovery, we’re spending about 1/10th of that on the latest Mac OSX for the upstairs computer and a family .mac account. I think this is, finally, a behavior changing crisis. I’ll make better use of that thumbnail drive, so my latest files are always in two places, minimum. Having three eras of email wiped out also means my odd dream of a lifetime of email as my journal is also gone. I’ll be deleting email much more frequently. Use of my wiki and blog will increase, as the one really good outcome of this was what I didn’t lose there.

This MacBook hasn’t even reached double-digits measuring its life in months. Methinks Apple may have reinvented the Lemon.