Cynically Optimistic

I can name that sound in one note. "The Click of Death" by Maxtor. Being sans laptop yesterday, I decided to fire up the old reliable G4 Sawtooth and burn a CD or two and look for some older photos for a friend who requested them. I was greeted with the horrible grey screen, and nothing more. Quoth the hard drive, "nevermore". Le Sigh.

After fighting for a while with jumper settings (thanks George), I managed to see that my extra backup drive was still ok, but NONE of the partitions on my main drive were showing up. And now you're thinking, "big deal, he's got it backed up for sure". You might be right, but my backup strategy has been, shall we say, less than extensively organized. I'm fairly sure I've got most (if not all) of my music backed up somewhere. Even if I don't, it's easily replaceable (thank you BitTorrent and Limewire and friends with copies). The thing that has me really nervous is my digital photos. I'm fairly certain that I went through and burned all of them off to CD, I just don't know where they might be. We're talking 3000+ photos here. They were all nestled gently in iPhoto, and now, I'm hoping that I was smart enough to copy that folder over to my other drive as a backup so it'll be easy to replace them.

So here's your disaster stimulated reminder to backup your digital files if you have things you don't want to lose and can't easily replace. Hopefully I haven't lost 3 years of NY memories to a bad HD and lazy backup practices.