Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

Right now, I’ve very, very, very glad that I got burned a few years back by not backing up my data and have been doing so diligently in the years since.

When I was in college, I had a catastrophic hard drive crash and pretty much lost everything. That taught me a lesson. I started by backing up to floppies, and soon moved to CD-ROMs when they are more affordable.

Now that I’ve got a home office and a business, I keep the majority of my business stuff backed up to a NAS (network attached storage) device in the office, which is backed up to an external USB hard drive. 95% of actual project code is saved to a versioning server (which lets me go back and see previous revisions of code) down at the datacenter, which of course has mirrored drives, and is backed up nightly to yet another machine, and every so often (in theory, weekly) I take copies of those backups to my bank vault.

Oh, and I still back up stuff to DVD-ROM every now and then.

All of this has paid off as of last night, when the hard drive in my laptop started complaining about “invalid node structures” and “I/O errors.” Not good.

I can still get data off of the drive … most of it, I think. So, I’m busy cloning the drive right now (to yet another external hard drive) to be sure that I have a really good idea of what software I had on there and have as good of a copy as I can of my preferences, etc. Then I’ll replace the hard drive over the weekend and get back up and running.

In any case, I’m still able to work this morning. However, I am, unfortunately, remined of one thing I didn’t have a backup of.

The laptop itself.

I’m a Mac user, and right now I’m having to use the Vista machine I keep in the office so I can test things on Windows, etc. Ick.

It’s not all that bad, really. It could be Windows ME.

The only real down side to this is that I can’t work in Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash right now since I only have those for the Mac so far (I need to rectify that, or have a spare Mac on hand), and that this is going to slow me down during a period where I’m already behind on work.

Oh, and congratulations to me! This is my 400th blog post! Whee!