hard drive woes

So, my mom’s computer is dead, due to a dead primary hard drive. On top of that, while moving files from my laptop to an external drive because my laptop was filling up, I fried the external drive. D’oh. One of the chips started smouldering and shining bright red. That’s bad for a computer part, right? Right.

Icky-poo. So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and send the thing to a drive repair shop. I’m actually a BIT happy about it because I had ANOTHER hard drive die a few years ago that had stuff from 10 years earlier backed up on it, so I’m sending that out too, just to see what I can recover. Free estimates, that’s good, but if it comes back $1700 bucks or so, which is eminently possible, I may say bye-bye to my data.

Aackphbt. I MUST implement a proper backup mechanism. In fact, I WAS implementing one, but things are no good when your drive failures occur during/because of your backup routine.

Learn from my mistakes. Backup now! Follow Brian Schmidt’s example… you can get a decent computer online these days that cost like $300 and run faster than the main computer I’m running now, video card notwithstanding. Buy three… set up a redundant SAN… love life.