Backup Woes
Few years ago, my laptop was stolen from my bedroom in a house less than a block from the police station. Since then, I’ve been very good about backing up work-related stuff.. but have been more lax about music, pictures and other large files.
Fast forward to last week: I dropped off my laptop at the Apple store to have the LCD cable replaced. Due to way Apple’s flatrate servicing works, they not only replaced the cable but also the aging hardrive and returned my laptop with a fresh install of Leopard minus all my files. Even though I hadn’t had any problems with the drive and wasn’t expecting it to be replaced (my request was only for the LCD cable), I had asked our department sysadmin to backup my entire harddrive in case the laptop was lost or damaged during shipping.
So when I got my laptop without all my files, I was frustrated with Apple for neither copying over my files nor contacting me before erasing them, but I wasn’t worried. I patted myself on the back for having a good automated backup strategy for work files and for being proactive enough to backup the entire drive before sending in the laptop. At worst, I thought, it would cost me an extra day without my laptop. Earlier today, I learned that the external drive used by our department sysadmin had failed. I had lost all music and photos. I don’t care much about the music but I had many photos I cared about. I panicked and rummaged through all my CDs and DVDs and looked through all the old folders on the external drive.
Luckily, last month, I was playing with Adobe Lightroom and had imported all of my iPhoto pics to it and tested its backup feature with my external drive.. so I was able to recover all photos more than a month old. I have no mp3s but there’s a box full of old CDs under my desk that I could reacquaint myself with (late nineties, here I come!).
So, remember kids, backup your files.. and backup your backups.
ps. I fully expect to make a post in a couple of months about how I’m glad I survived the fire/tornado/whatever but really wished that I had used some off-site backups.
2 Comments