Thursday 20 August 2009

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 3

I walked into the kitchen carrying the remains of my laptop at 11.30pm.
The lights were all on, and there, at the table, tiptapping at a netbook
was the one person in the house best qualified to understand what had
just happened to me - my step-brother-in-law (I have a highly hyphenated
family) Simon, who 10 years ago guided me through the creation of my
first commercial website.

We fell on the corpse with ghoulish enthusiasm, and dissected it
together, discovering after a very few minutes (and a cup of tea) that
the harddrive had just about ceased to be.

No problem - I could slot a new hard drive in myself, what could that
cost? £30 - £50 max. We hopped on line to check - and learned that the
cheapest HD on offer for my X40 was $285, plus shipping, from the US.

Oh well, so this was going to be one of those expenses failures - and
there was still no promise that I could restore the data after the event.

At 12.30 I crashed as suddenly as the computer, just about hitting the
spare bed on the way down.

I slept surprisingly well - because there was one spectacular upside to
our autopsy.
.
We managed to get the harddrive turning for all of 5 minutes before it
went for eternity into that dark night which awaits us all. And five
minutes was just enough to snatch the finished draft and splat it onto a
borrowed thumb drive.

Everything else might be gone, I might not have the means to edit or
send it - but the script was safe.

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