It was bound to happen to me sooner or later. I’ve had so many computers from the lowly Matel Aquarious, TI-99, Apple II (e and my favorite C+), 8086’s, 486’s, PII’s, Powerbooks, Macbooks, and the list goes on. I’ve never had a hard-drive failure with anything. Sure, I’ve done back-ups and tried to keep dilligent using travan tapes, zip drives, syquest drives, firewire, and that list goes on too. But Murphy’s Law just comes to find you eventually…

And it finally did…

My Macbook HDD crashed a few weeks back and boy was I unprepared. Just after CES of all times. I played with Time Machine and created a backup, but it was from March 2008. I filled up the two Time Machine drives and didn’t bother to get anymore or clean up my old backups. I let things slip, I know…I should know better…fine…sue me.

I went through the classic 6 stages of Data Crash Syndrome (DCS). Shock, denial, anger, despair, acceptance, and finally coping.

What follows next is my rapid 10 mins decent through DCS.

Shock:
What the heck is going on here? A clicking noise?

Denial:
There’s no clicking noise…no way is my hard drive dying. I can save it…running disk utilities saves things…it’s okay…no worries…I’m smart…I’m really really smart…I can figure this out…

Okay, so Disk Utilities didn’t work. You know, I can just swap the drive out and pull the stuff out I need to. No problems. I’ve got a spare FireWire case around here. Let’s just pop the drive in and I’m good to go.

Swaps out drive into FireWire enclosure
No drive attached? Whaddya mean no drive attached? There’s a drive in there. Still clicking though…you know, I’ll just take the drive apart
and move the arms. Then I get really smart..

Let’s see now, if I just pry the drive cover off…oh wow..shiney. Yeah see, there’s the problem…some dust got it there. Looks like a fingerprint too…oh crap..that’s mine. This might not be a good idea. Let’s wipe it down…I’m smart, I’m really really smart…

Wait, that’s not supposed to go there…what now? Hmm…it’ll still power up. Yeah…sure it’ll still power up.

Anger:
No problems. See, it powers up…wait…don’t do that…no, don’t click…WTF???

What is this? Is that German? I don’t freakin’ read German. Why the heck is my computer speaking to me in tongues?

Despair:
Oh man…all my pictures and files…aww crap I just bought Kung Fu Panda yesterday on iTunes. That’s gone…and I didn’t get to watch it once.

Google it. A hail mary if I ever saw one. Disk Warrior huh? Let’s give that a shot.

……No good……

Acceptance:
It’s gone. It’s really really gone. Everything.

Coping:
Luckily I had an old backup from Time Machine…from 2008. Pictures I can save as I made copies of the important stuff (kids and family moments) for various family members…I just have to fly a few thousand miles to get it back.

So what’s the lesson we’ve learned? Back it up! Like anything critically important, we don’t really think about this stuff until we really need it. For the home user, it’s rare that we think about this kind of thing. We always think it won’t be us and we’ll be fine. We say to ourselves, “I’m not about to spend another $100-$200 on an external drive or burn a disc of my stuff. It’s just a waste of time.”

Until your time comes.

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