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January 2001: Paul Smith writes... About Fatal Hard Driving
Sometimes my sitcom life gets a reality check. You see, it’s not been a great month for me. I had a death in the family and I was robbed too. Don’t panic, it’s not quite as grim a picture as I paint. The death was my hard drive. I’ve been robbed of my data.
It’s a simple cautionary tale from someone who always said “It’ll never happen to me” right up to the moment I booted my machine, only to have the drive sound like someone playing the spoons. It’s hard to describe the feeling that comes over you. Imagine a bucket full of iced water being poured down your spine. My MP3 collection, R.I.P. My digital camera pictures, including the eclipse and a lot of other good memories; Goodbye. I bid my scanner drivers a fond farewell. My high-scores and saved-games, Ciao. Adieu to my erotic French lithograph collection. And a big hello to hours of reinstalling Windows and other assorted ‘ware. Hi to trawling the ‘net for drivers for a SCSI card even the manufactures refuse to admit exists. You get the picture. More seriously my soundcard, an obscure Yamaha chipset onboard jobbie (I use the word jobbie in its scatological sense) has always been a bit funny about conflicts and is still resisting working a week later. I can’t even find the code for my Office 97 disk, so I’m typing this in Notepad! If that’s not proof that there is a God, and he hates me, I don’t know what is.
Just before the terminal event I should have heard the giggles of the Irony Pixies as I said to myself, “I really should back up some of this stuff onto CD some time”. I’d been toying with the idea of getting a bigger drive anyway because the accursed 5.7Gb I had was looking fullish. In their defence, Maxtor sent me an advance replacement in just 2 days. Their speed hadn’t been an issue because I’d already rushed out and bought a 30Gb drive form my local Indie, only to discover my bios would only see the first 8.4Gb of it. Feck. Luckily when my Maxtor drive arrived its paperwork described some software which avoided this limitation and I went to the Samsung website for their equivalent, which works perfectly. Speaking of websites, hallelujah for mine! 25Mb of files held ‘offsite’ does mean I’ve not lost absolutely everything. My Indie-waffle.doc’s were there, as was a good selection of pictures, albeit low-res ones. I’ve also been able to claw back some pictures I e-mailed to friends. It’s a fairly sorry collection compared to the Gig-or-so that I’ve lost. Cut up? I feel like a pair of Punks trousers.
Summing up time. Irreplaceable stuff, lost. The night time shots of Dungeness power station lit up like a tree on Christmas morning, for example, would require another 2am start and a 360 mile round trip to reproduce. I’m going to have to wait 87 years for another eclipse of the sun in the UK. There’s some ex- girlfriends smiles I’ll not be seeing again. I know a lot of you don’t back-up as often as you should, and for you it’s more than your photo albums and music collections at stake, it’s your business. I beg you, get a second drive and a removable bay for your server and back up whenever you can. As Del Boy would say, you know it makes sense. And for once he’d be right.
I hope this is Ok Dale. You’re going to have to run a good spell checker over it (I don’t have an app. with one at the moment) and if its a bit long/short, let me know (No word-count either). Thanks very much for the cheque and I’ll have that Digital Camera piece done (again!) soon. Take care and if I don’t talk to you between now and then, have a great Christmas and a very pleasant New Year!
Paul