Well, I took poor old Vexxis out to Mac1 today in a, “Please, please oh wise Mac gods save my data!” kinda way. So it’s been put in for service and the initial estimate for recovery is about $400. If it can be recovered, and there’s no guarantee of that, either, until someone’s opened up the case and had a look at what’s actually physically wrong. And if the drive really is dead? Then it’s about $300 for the smallest replacement drive. And if not that… where’s my recovered data (let’s just pretend I have some, oh please oh please oh please) going to go? 50gig of stuff, man. That’s not a lot nowadays, sure, but still…
Ironically, the cost of the disk recovery is slightly more than I was going to spend about two months ago on an external hard drive to keep my Time Machine backups on. We ostensibly have a SAN at home but the wireless network isn’t robust enough for me to point Time Machine across it without it giving Finder a bouncing ball from “could not find network resource” when the wireless drops out, as it does with cheerful regularity. And I think after yesterday there’s no way I’m going to go back to relying on any manual system for back-ups. So either I need a new backup plan or our network infrastructure at home needs a serious renovation, which is difficult because we have pretty much zero room to move in (single power-points, only one phone jack in the bedroom, that sort of thing).
It also occurred to me last night that Vexxis is four years old. That makes it literally the oldest computer I’ve used since I started buying my own computers in first year uni; my desktop has rolled over every two years fairly reliably, but Vexxis just chugs along. I use it every day for almost everything, and I’m not exactly gentle with it (I mean, I don’t beat it around but it’s a laptop and I do move it around while it’s doing disk IO). In fact, I can think of exactly three things I don’t use it for; gaming, archiving media and downloading stuff. That’s what my half terabyte desktop is for and, hrm, I wonder if a Firewire cable between that and my currently-non-existent laptop would solve my problems? I wonder if I’ve even got my Firewire ports plugged into the motherboard…
So in computer years, Vexxis is roughly as old as my mum. It’s the age where the parts start to fail, so I’m not exactly surprised this happened (the fact that I was checking out backup strategies the other month kinda implies I was expecting it, after all) but it’s still… very upsetting.
Best case scenario?
- I get my data back.
- Vexxis’ HDD is okay; a zeroing out fixes the corruption, and the OS can be reinstalled and the data returned.
- I buy a Firewire cable and start backing up on my desktop.
Current estimated cost? About $400. And the boogeyman of Time Machie/Firewire/Vista-64 compatibility.
And you know what I blame for this whole sorry saga? Smallville. Yeah, you heard me; because you know what I was doing last night when the kernel panic hit? I was importing Smallville episodes into iTunes so I could sync them to the batPod and watch them on the TV. It was totally against my better judgement but I’d run out of BTAS and needed some noise.
So the one lesson I’ve learnt from this whole sorry saga? Don’t watch motherfucking Smallville.
I can live with that.
934 days ago
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