I was pretty excited on Friday when my paycheck contained time-and-a-half pay for more than 20 hours of overtime. And to compensate myself for the stress I experienced while putting in those extra hours, last weekend I took myself shopping for some new work clothes. An afternoon by myself, wandering around shopping in downtown Seattle, was exactly the type of retail therapy I had been craving. Let's just say I came home with quite a few bags.
On Sunday I needed to knock some things off my never ending to-do list, so I started the morning off by doing my taxes. This ended up being another great experience, because I discovered I will be getting almost two grand in returns this year! I immediately began planning what I would do with the money (or at least what's left of it after I pay off winter quarter tuition).
However, my day was about to take a turn for the worst. If you're familiar with Sex & the City, specifically, the season 4 episode entitled "My Motherboard, My Self" then I don't even have to go any further. For the rest of you... go ahead and keep reading.
On Saturday night my iBook froze while I was surfing the net. I immediately force quit the application and noticed a weird, "your computer will now be required to shut down" message I had never seen before. From that point on, I couldn't get the damn thing to restart, so I made a Sunday afternoon appointment at the Mac store. Diagnosis, "Um, yeah, I think your hard drive is fried. Do you have everything backed up?"
F*CK.
And there you go, folks. For those of you, like me, who have been thinking for months and months that you really need to get an external hard drive and back up your files, PLEASE DO IT. The Seattle Mac Store was not able to recover any of the data from my hard drive, so in order to recover FOUR YEARS WORTH of photos from my computer, I have to send it to DriveSavers for the bargain price of $855. Oh, and I also need to purchase a new hard drive. OUCH. Looks like my tax return just found a new home, and it's not in my savings account.
Live and learn, people. Live and learn...
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
O-M-G. I'm so sorry to hear that. I have definitely started backing up and I hope when I go in this weekend I don't get the same diagnosis early.
Ouch. Sorry.
External hard drives are no guarantee. They're marginally more reliable than internal ones because (1) they're not on as often, and (2) they usually stay at a lower temperature than an internal drive does inside a computer.
However, they can still fail. The last time an external drive failed on me was 2007. "Recovering" it cost me $3851. As in almost four thousand dollars.
I keep wondering when someone is going to create a home kit for doing this, or somehow make the process cheaper to WIPE OUT these gougers.
The best external drives I've used, out of maybe a dozen, are made by LaCie.
All that aside, I'm terribly sorry that you lost a mountain of data, and hope that DriveSavers can recover most of it. Preferably all of it. They were one of the first companies in the world to offer this service, and if they can't recover your stuff, no one can. :)
Thanks Stinger. I hear that DriveSavers can supposedly work miracles, but we'll see... I actually had to opt to only recover my .jpg files. Recovering everything would have come with a $2,400 price tag, and that's just not something I can afford right now. But I at least had to recover the photos... that's four years of my life! I cried when I found out my drive had crashed, mostly becaues of that. :-(
Post a Comment