Technology will fail
Rule #1. Technology will fail.
Rule #2. If you believe that your technology is failsafe, see rule #1.
My computer crashed today. I’ve been working up a post about my recent road trip from Ashland, Oregon, to Fayetteville, Arkansas. The posts along the way were fun, but now that I’ve been sitting still for more than a few days I wanted to go over the trip in more detail. Talk a little bit about the great malt in Shady Grove, Oregon at Phil’s Frosty or the root beer float from Boise’s Westside Diner.
Instead I’m contemplating computercide. After spending hours putting together a map of my travels on google maps I was just about to import the images into photoshop so that I could put them all together into one wonderful picture. Then everything locked up. When I tried to restart I just got a grey startup screen. No icons. No Happy Mac. No spinning gear. Not good. I’ve tried starting up from the system disk without success. I’ve tried resetting PRAM, Firmware, using a remote boot drive… no luck.
After doing some research online I’m pretty sure that my hard drive is fried. Fortunately I’ve not lost anything thanks to Leopard’s Timemachine. If it is the hard drive then once I install a new one I’ll be able to restore everything from my back up on Timemachine.
There you go. It’s not a matter of if your computer will fail, just a matter of when.
Backups, my friend, backups.
Note, though, at WD, our return rate is about 1% and the majority of these saw some kind of physical damage (e.g. were dropped). This rate is going down due to the use of fluid dynamic bearings (can withstand a lot of abuse) and parking heads onto ramps and sensors that detect free fall and park the heads. Note, too, that no small portion of our returns are No Problem Found.
Might I suggest something like the WD Passport as a backup device for your laptop?
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?Cat=9