July 13, 2004
The sound of silence.
At least the hard drive that contained data I had actually backed up still works. The other drive — my boot drive — doesn’t. Applications. Email. Prefs. Several gigabytes worth of current work files scattered all over the blessed desktop. Poof.
Reflecting on this incident, I have determined that I feel much more comfortable with catastrophic hardware failures when the device in question makes agonizingly painful noises before it runs up the curtain.
Scratch. Scrape. Click-chunk. Click-chunk.
At least you know something is wrong. It’s the silent deaths that bother me. Like the one that happened today. All I did was open a PDF and then, suddenly … the world was frozen solid. One big slice of bitmapped work-in-progress staring back at me, zombie-like, from Cinema Display purgatory.
Ah, but there’s always a bright side, right?
The thing about the silence … it generally means that the on-board drive controller pooched, not the platters. When there’s a lack audible evidence indicating that disks and heads have been gouging high-velocity chunks out of each other — it’s good news for the data recovery boys.
Yes, I should’ve had my home folder backed up. I know that. I’ve always known that. Yes, I do have half of it backed up somewhere. I think it’s been ripening for a few dozen months on the server. Should be ready to go any minute now. Feh. And you know what topped the day off? The office coffee maker went tits up this morning as well. Tempting fate, I’m just sitting around this evening waiting for the third boot to drop.
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