C-R-A-S-H

CRASH – Crummy Rotten Appalling Sick Hard-disk.

Got into the office on Tuesday morning, full of verve, only to be greeted by this cryptic message:

"Disk Read Failure. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

Dejavu. Exactly one month ago, I stepped into the office, half an hour before an important meeting to be greeted by an almost identical message. Only that time, the screen was a lot bluer and there were numbers all over the screen. My heart sank… I had not backed-up some important code, documents and e-mail since a few days ago and this time, the hard-disk could not be detected even after trying it in other laptops and external USB casings. Basically, this thing was hosed.

As if things were not bad enough, I got home wanting to update my blog (which was 1 month behind) and was greeted by this message :

"WP doesn't seem to be installed."

WP stands for WordPress, the blogging software I’m using. So I fire up my MySQL Administrator and log into my blog database and find that all my data is missing! I contact Brinkster tech support and am patiently told that the database server had, you guessed it, c-r-a-s-h-e-d, and that I should’ve backed up my data yadda yadda. *groan*

To cut a long story short, after two failed Hitachi Deathstars (Hitachi Deskstar is the actual laptop hard-disk brand) in the space of a month and many tech support calls to restore my blog, I decided to get myself a new external hard-disk to do backups on a regular basis. Being so reliant on the digital, losing data is like getting part of my memory wiped out. Another crash and I’ll develop amnesia!

My new Seagate 300GB backup drive in an external Sarotech aluminium casing. Who says backing up data can’t be sexy?

Anyway, Kaidy, guess I can really empathise with you better now! Haha…