My 6,000 piso external hard drive broke, taking with it all my movies, television programs, and photo archive. I figure it was because I dropped it last night... but only a distance about 24 inches. I had it sitting on the keyboard of the laptop and then it slid off from the chair I was on.
The annoying part is that the hard drive continued to work for 2 more hours of watching video before I went to bed, and then was recognized by my PlayTime machine this evening (momentarily) when I plugged it in before going tits up.
Well, as you all know: If I own it, it's going to break sooner rather than later. This is just another good example of that in action.
I'm going to drop it off with computer engineer Rommel in town this weekend, and see if there is any hope. Probably not. (And no: I can't take it back to Thailand for a refund.)
What about the magic word "backup", Jil?
ReplyDeleteWhat else would you call a 1.5 TB external hard drive, if not "backup"?
ReplyDeleteWell, okay... I put some television series on it without backup because they were too big (8 GB per season) to keep on the hard drive of my computer, and those are gone. But, I can just download the ones that aren't already on DVDs again.
Basically the only thing I lost was forever was the 100 or so movies that my friend Simon put on the drive for me when he bought it in Thailand. Those too weren't backed up and I hadn't finished watching them. Those too I could download again if I wished.
I'm just pissed that once again I bought a piece of equipment that was determined to break at the soonest possible moment.
Hi Jil, How's it going?
ReplyDeleteI would call a 1.5 TB drive with your only copies of "whatever ya got" on it " "something you should backup", cause if those are your only copies, they ain't yer backup! :-)
I realize that you do back up some stuff from your computer to that drive. (or 'did' anyway.)
There is a feature called S.M.A.R.T. built into hard drives these days. It allows you to monitor the drive health in real time. Since I run Linux, I don't know how to enable that feature for a Windows box. (Last coded for Windows in 1997, Speech recognition software :-) )
I know the horse is out of the barn already, I just want to suggest you enable live SMART monitoring on your hard drives, all the time.
Being a ham-handed, clumsy oaf my self, I've noticed that paying extra attention to (and paying extra money for) physical robustness in everything around me actually saves me money. :-) There are some external drive chassis systems that are designed to protect the drive mounted inside from being damaged by drops, slams, or being driven over. You can even create your own with sheet metal left over from old PC cases. Except for being driven over, for that you probably need milled out blocks of aluminum.
Grum's Law ( aka The Causal
Universe):
If something can go wrong, and you don't take whatever measures are needed to recover from that event, then that something -will- go wrong and at the worst possible moment. Conversely if you have the recovery system in place, you will never need it, and it will appear to have been wasted effort and expense. In truth, however, the presence of the recovery mechanism is what has kept the universe from having that thing go wrong, and it is now waiting for you to remove the recovery mechanism(s) so that then (and only then) it will go forward with that "something going wrong event".
File under:
"What's that? An elephant scarecrow!"
So am I saying that I think people can actually control the actions of the Universe by what they do along these lines?
No, not unless you're willing to pay me to do so. :)
Then why is it called "..Causal Universe" ? 'Cause all dem folks who believe it are just the people I want to have in my newly formed, just now in fact, religion. ;-)