Without even time for a “Berlin Diaries Part II,” we’re back in sunny Kitsilano… to the news that the hard drive on our desktop computer is kaput.
I’ve had a computer’s hard drive go south before — a laptop that happened to be holding the only copy of every speech I’d written in the 1997 federal election campaign. Poof: gone.
Ever since, I’ve been a little paranoid about data storage. But it was only a month or two ago that Alex passed on a little tidbit that she’d picked up in her research: unless you have your data in more than one place, you don’t really have it.
It was with that in mind that we recently acquired an external Firewire hard drive, and laboriously transferred the data on our various computers to it. The process went relatively smoothly, although the desktop computer — which has been flakey in the past — had a few hiccups along the way.
A few days later, the desktop went down. We resurrected it briefly thanks to Alsoft DiskWarrior, but a week later it was dead, dead, dead.
The problem: the internal hard drive had croaked. And it would have taken a slew of extremely important data with it, if not for that external drive.
The moral? Back up your data. Get a CD burner, a DVD burner, a tape drive or an external hard drive — whatever you need — but back up your data. It would have been a far more sour homecoming if we hadn’t.
