It's (Not) Alive!
You hear cautionary tales about it all the time, but the true horror doesn't strike until it happens to you.
CHDD: Catastrophic Hard Drive Death.
I spent the past five weeks traveling -- visiting family and driving all over the northeast. I planned to do some work while we were on the road. After all, the home office is a nice comfort, but not necessary. I work on a laptop. My office goes where I go.
Two weeks into the trip, I settled down in an unused bedroom of my in-laws' house to start polishing up my latest spec. Half an hour later, I noticed an occassional, faint buzz emanating from the left palmrest of my Apple Powerbook.
That's where the hard drive lives.
As one of the few moving parts in a computer, hard drives make noise. But I've been using this laptop for a couple of years, and this was a new noise.
And it started to get worse. Louder. More frequent.
I made a panicked phone call to my Techie Friend, who had me run a couple of disk utilities that should tell whether or not the hard drive is starting to fail. The tests showed nothing. The hard drive appeared to be in good health.
But then something really disturbing happened. I went to save a file and, while the program was writing to the disk, the buzzing noise kicked in and the system froze. I got that spinning, technicolor pinwheel of death (you Mac users know what I'm talking about).
I was about to force quit when, all the sudden, the buzzing noise stopped and the system unfroze. The file had even been saved. But, disk utilities be damned, something was definitely not right.
As Somerset warned Mills, "This isn't gonna have a happy ending."
I transferred my working files to my wife's iBook and, the next day, my Powerbook shit the bed. Wouldn't even boot up. It was dead. Kaput. It was no more.
This was an ex-hard drive.
I shipped it back to Apple, and they replaced the hard drive. What that means, of course, is that everything on the old drive was gone. Just a ghost of ones and zeroes, lost to the digital ether.
The good news: I had a backup. I always backup. I'm practically religious about it. I'm gay for backing up.
The bad news: the backup was at home in Los Angeles, so I lost a couple weeks of laptop use. Which was annoying, but tolerable.
The great news: my backup procedure has always been to simply copy my personal files, not the programs themselves. In otherwords, I just drop my home folder onto an external drive. It's a simple and quick system. The drawback is, in the event of CHDD, you have to reinstall every program and reset every preference. However, in one of the few strokes of good fortune to grace my pathetic life, I had recently changed my backup procedure. A couple months ago, I bought a new external drive -- a 500GB Maxtor One-Touch Firewire drive.
My old external was also a Maxtor One-Touch, but I'd never used the one-touch feature. With the new drive, I decided to give it a shot.
Here's how it works:
Before you use the drive, you partition it, creating a separate partition that is at least as big as your internal hard drive. Then you setup the Maxtor software, creating a backup script., which allows you to perform a complete backup of your hard drive by simply pushing the lone button on the front of the external drive.
It takes a while to run the backup. But, when you're done, what you've got is an exact duplicate of the contents of your internal drive. You can even boot up from the external drive (which is exactly how you restore the backup to your new internal drive).
I had run my very first one-touch backup just a week before we left for our trip. So, instead of reinstalling several dozen programs and futzing with preferences and settings, all I had to do was boot up from the external drive and, using the Maxtor software, restore from the backup.
The results are, essentially, magic. It's like the hard drive never died.
I'm going to make this full backup procedure part of my regular routine.
My work -- the fruits of my labor -- exists in an ethereal form on my hard drive. In years past, I made sure to have paper printouts of every version of every script I wrote. That practice filled up a four-drawer filing cabinet. But nowadays, I tend to deliver drafts to my employers as a PDF file. The last script I wrote, I never printed out a single copy. I don't need to anymore.
That's nice and convenient, but it means I have to take extra measures to make sure I don't lose this stuff. I take this seriously. My work has value. I always felt that way, of course, even before I was getting paid for it. But now that I am getting paid, my work has value to people other than myself.
I simply can't imagine the horror of having to call a studio executive and tell her that the script they paid me to write, the one I spent the past six months working on, vanished in a flurry of grinding noises inside my laptop. That would be a catastrophic failure -- on the part of both the hard drive and my wee little brain.