Well, I’m back in action following my hard drive crash.
I lost 3 months of data.
Yeah, I suck.
To be more precise, I didn’t lose everything. My source code is pretty religiously backed up to a remote server via CVS, and I have paper records of a lot of things, so I can reconstruct much of what was lost. I did lose about 8 hours of work on one web site, which sucks, and I’m still trying to get my MP3 collection off of my iPod (400 songs to go…). The time taken to recover from this mess is a billion times more than the effort it took to actually replace the hard drive (29 screws to get it out!), and the opportunity cost of lost freelance work is way more than the cost of the hardware ($200 for a new 60 gig drive, with tax, plus another $75 for a 2.5 inch enclosure in a vain attempt to get the old drive to spin up).
Lesson learned. I’m now a licensed user of ChronoSync, and I’m backing up all my critical files to the iPod daily. That still doesn’t save me enough time in the event that I have to reinstall all my software, so as soon as the move is done (I am on a budget, here), we’ll be adding 2 250 gig drives to the G4, mirrored via RAID, which should be enough to hold incremental backups via Retrospect (already owned, but too slow and clunky with the current setup), and we might also go with external drives and Carboon Copy Cloner. It’s a bit more ambitious than previous plans, but this has been an expensive lesson. Thankfully, living in Toronto means I don’t have to take the extra step of actually keep spare drives in stock.
Oh, one last rule: always print out your software license keys. I’ll be spending the week trying to get new keys from 4 or 5 different companies that I’ve bought from in the last few months. We’ll see how that goes…
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