iBlog

Some people gotta’ learn the hard way…

I’ve been sick. I usually don’t get sick. I accumulate vacation days twice as fast as sick days, and I have saved up more than twice as many sick days than vacation days. The last time I was this sick was when I had the flu in 2000. Yep, six years ago. This time it ended up as bronchitis (I am assuming). I was out for a week and a half and I am still coughing — mostly at night and in the morning (when I change position).

At any rate, that helps explain the lack of blogging recently.

But there’s been another sick feeling — this one in the pit of my stomach when I had to face the fact that I had a catastrophic hard drive failure.

Last week a cat wandered into a substation and chewed through some wires. The surge that killed it also caused a power outage for several hours in parts of Tucson — parts that included my house. The iMac was sleeping, and so ended up not shutting down properly when we lost power. When I booted it that morning I got a kernel panic. I could not boot from a CD and had to bring it in to the Apple store (after calling Apple Care).

Back to the sick feeling - there was nothing to do but wipe the drive and see if it was salvageable. I had backed up, but not in a while. We lost a lot of pictures. I’ve managed to find a few here and there — most lower resolution shots uploaded to flickr.

So the iMac is back (turns out my extra RAM is bad), 7,000+ images have been re-imported from CD and DVD to iPhoto and SuperDuper! is doing its backup thing to a new 500GB external hard drive as I type.

If you have not backed up your hard drive(s) - go, do it now. SuperDuper! is free for basic functionality, and I plan on dropping the very reasonable ~$30 for the scheduling, etc. that it affords so that I will have a recent copy — more recent than what I had this time — should the inevitable happen again. And I’ll still backup the pictures to removable media and probably store them at work.

Just to be safe…