I am fairly careful with my data; I backup my photos and music to external hard-drives on a semi-regular basis. So I was not very happy when I lost almost 6 months’ worth of photos and downloads and general digital art, through a combination of bad luck and a misplaced optimism in technology.
Although my PC is too old to use these new-fangled SATA drives, I found an adaptor to allow me to install a massive 500 gigbyte SATA drive. brilliant, thinks me, I can put almost all of my stuff on this massive drive (except my songs which all live on an external drive) and backup the important stuff to my external drives.
There was strange burning smell coming from the PC, probably the fluff in the power supply. That’s OK, I need to get a supply with higher output, it’ll be fine for a week or two until I get paid. Except… the burning smell was coming from the new drive, along with SMOKE. I think one of the 1st rules of tech repair is When you’ve got smoke coming out of your PC is is probably broken.
Of course this happened before I’d fully backed everything up. Of course it did. So what did I lose? All my holiday photos from this year, and most of my photos from past couple of years, and Some music ideas I’d left on the desktop instead of putting on the music drive, and loads of stuff I can’t remember, because there was a fair bit of it.
Luckily, I had backed up my Windows installation to DVD-R a fw months back, so at least that works.
I could probably have condensed this blog down to the more pithy: ‘I didn’t backup my data and now I am sorry‘ .
What? Why Bother? 