After almost 3 years of loyal service, our trusty little Apple Macbook finally had a hiccup. A big one. Since the start of the year Bec has been working on a special DVD project to celebrate Kath's 30th birthday - a chronicle of the trips we took together while Kath was living in England. It was finally all done a fortnight ago, but it seems the final effort of compiling the DVD was too much for the Mac's Seagate hard drive, which shortly after refused to produce anything other than ominous ticking noises.
"Oh well" we hear you say, "you guys would have backed up all your stuff regularly, so no big deal". Well, ummm... We last backed up in January this year. That means we've potentially lost ALL our digital photos from Iceland, Marrakech, Carcassonne, Bletchley Park, Rutland and the Peak District. About 1000 in all we estimate. Damn and blast.
A trip to some expert data-recovery people confirmed that the drive was indeed cream-crackered. They could attempt a difficult and dangerous "spindle swap" operation but chances of recovery would be slim, and the cost of finding out would be steep. We've declined this option and will be looking at other companies for a second opinion, as there is no shortage of disaster-recovery specialists around the country. We're clearly not the only ones not backing up often enough!
As of now, a new brutal backup regime is swinging into place. We're talking multiple backup disks, periodic copies, automatic internet uploads, the works. Remember people, if your stuff doesn't exist in at least two places, it doesn't exist!
Tuesday 23 June 2009
Disaster!
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6 comments:
I know your pain. My laptop managed to drink to much beer one house party and suffered a painful death. I never backed anything up because I'm a fool and in truth didn't know what back up was… other than the tape that my old boss used to make me change everyday in the big black machine.
At first we though it had sorosis of the Hard Drive but then he went into Motherboard-cardiac arrest. We managed to bring him back with the paddles but he was only given an hour or so to live. We had him back for long enough to transfer the vital information onto Justin external drive. Finally his keys stopped working and then he passed away. Time of death was 2hrs after his drink of beer. Fowl play was involved as I was the only person allowed to use the laptop but I wasn’t drinking beer at that party. Course of death is still pending Coroner inquiry.
So sorry to hear about this disaster guys!
Backups are tedious but you've reminded me that there are a few things I've got to resolve with my backup strategy...
For the record, on the Mac, Super Duper is a wonderful, simple, backup program. It allows you to create a completely bootable clone of your hard drive. Swap your old drive out, drop the clone in and continue as you were. Just schedule it to backup weekly to an external drive and you're good to go.
I used it before I went overseas last year and, when my laptop was stolen, I was able to get a replacement and drop in my clone. No harm done.
I also recommend Jungle Disk which works with Amazon's S3 storage service. Fantastic off-site backup utility.
Remember if your backups all exist in the same physical location you're still screwed! (Theft and fire may get you...)
I know that none of that helps you now but hopefully you can avoid issues in the future!
oh, see now i feel responsible for the demise of your hard drive. :( But on a brighter note, the dvd i received is absolutely awesome!!! Great job!
I have (foolishly) never backed up anything...and my trusty Mac hasn't let me down yet. But your experience has me thinking that now is the time to get serious about collecting a bunch of blank cds, and burning copies of, at the very least, all my photos! Maybe I'll put them all onto an external drive as well, just to be sure.
I hope you recover your photos!!!
And once again, thanks for my dvd! :)
That sucks - our laptop HDD also died a few years ago. Luckily my last photo backup was only 2 months prior to that, so I lost SOME photos but not too many luckily.
A good habit I have gotten into with photos is this:
- Schedule a reminder to back up your photos (to DVD/CD) every 3 months (or whatever is appropriate for you).
- Take the backup DVD/CD to another location (like work).
- In the 3 month window before your next backup, try to keep 2 copies of your photos (1 on the computer, 1 on the SD card of the camera).
- Whenever you transfer more photos to your computer, don't delete them off your SD card.
- When you do your next backup to DVD, this is the time to clear your SD card.
It basically guarantees that you always have 2 copies of every photo (SD/computer, or computer/DVD), which significantly reduces the risk of losing photos forever.
In general I find there's very little on a computer which I would mind if I lost (photos being one of them). Just focus on the data which is really important for you and make sure you have a backup strategy in place for THAT data.
Thanks for the top tips guys!
Heartbreaking stuff... hope another company can recover some photos for you
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