The wind had picked up, as did the rain. Our first fall storm continued. However, in spite of the flickering power and lights, I was perfectly content. After all, we were on the generator, which provided enough power for me to keep working to finish my blog post.
Damn, it happened again; lights on, lights off. Every time the power went on, we’d cut the generator only to have to repower it up again and hour or so later. At least the power, once it went off, did come back up quickly, within a couple of hours, and much sooner than the typical cycle of events. There have been times that we’ve been without power for days, and once, a few years ago, we were without power for a week due to bad storms and road closures. I remember working on a video project for a client where I was rushing against a Christmas deadline and with limited power. All the power that we had coming from the generator was siphoned into my studio/home office. Power cords everywhere, it was a mess. But I did finish the project, albeit the clients family back east did not get their movie until the day after Christmas. So this … this should be a piece of cake.
As I typed away, I noticed that one of my drives wasn’t showing up. Never mind, I thought, I’ll finish my post and then worry about it later. The post went up and I went to work, moving the extension chords out of the way and getting equipment off their power strip and back to where everything belonged. But my drive was still MIA. I tried rebooting, new cables, powering down, then up, disk repair, to no avail. The drive, simply wouldn’t boot. The drive won’t boot, “OH MY GOD THE DRIVE WON’T BOOT!” My husband could hear my panic from across the hall. Actually, I’m fairly certain that even the neighbors were able to hear my panic attack in spite of a storm and rain hitting so hard it sounded like workers banging on the roof. We continued to try everything, including yet more cables and three different computers, different operating systems, yet nothing worked. The drive refused to come up (and I yelled at it as if it had a conscience and it were spiting me just to teach me a lesson). I took a deep breath to see, double check, once again, to absolutely make certain the drive that died was NOT my primary photo drive. Yes. Thank goodness, it was the backup drive, not the primary drive that stores my 1600+ photos, spanning years of picture taking, travels and whatnot. Of course, now that I was over the temporary rise in blood pressure and relief it wasn’t my primary drive, it was the whatnots that concerned me. For you see, that second partition on my backup drive housed my entire music, movie and TV collection. All the content I had purchased from the iTunes music store was housed on that drive! Was I smart enough to have backed up that partition? No, I was not. I went against common sense and all that experience has taught me about backups and computer equipment. I just forgot. How, I wondered could I have been so careless? I know these things happen and I know to always back up my content. And I always back up my content. Although, now I could no longer use the word, “always.”
Bill took the drive and continued CPR efforts to no avail. Do I have a copy of the software program, Disk Warrior, he asks? Without one peep, not a single word, I give him “that look”, the one that answers his question, but with a serious attitude. And so he assured me that we’d buy a copy of the software, these things happen, and he’s sure he can get into the drive. He’s sure he can, he’s sure he can, he’s sure he can, and I am now contemplating giving him “that look” again, because I am thoroughly disgusted, but I think better of it. After all, he is trying to help and it’s not his fault I was careless.
Meanwhile, I am faced with the fact that my primary drive no longer has a backup drive. It’s still raining and I don’t want a repeat of events. I frantically go through my office, searching for every available drive I own, be it a big one or a small one. Finally, I’ve located 3 drives and I diligently go to work backing up here, backing up there, backing up, backing up everywhere. It’s a whacky system, but it worked. I had enough room on each of the drives to get every important photo backed up. God forbid, however, that I need to use this whacked out system to really find anything. But at least I can sleep through the night knowing photos are safe. As luck would have it, in my finding space to back up my photos, I also find a “partial” backup of the drive that I lost. While it doesn’t contain everything, it does have all my music and half of the video content that I purchased. And so the memories come rushing back as to why I had not finished doing the back up of my music content -- I had run out of room. I had had good intentions of backing up some content to DVD and the rest to another drive. And what’s that quote about good intentions? Ahh yes, those were the drudge tasks that I was putting off for a rainy day. Can anyone guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?
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Posted by: dissertation writing help | June 19, 2009 at 06:55 AM