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Stop telling me I'm a nut. It hurts enough as it is.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Do as I say, not as I do: Disaster strikes even the experts among us


Oct. 15, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   A power surge or some other unknown force fried the hard drive on my Apple G4 last week. Because I'm such an expert on everything related to computers, I had a full backup of everything on my Mac and was able to swap drives and get it back up and running within 15 minutes.
   Yeah, right. I'm such a dope, not an expert. No expert would be so dumb. I truth, I had no usable backup at all. All my Mac files are in limbo right now. My G4 is in the shop as I write this, being ministered to by the capable experts -- these are real ones, not the dopey kind -- at Applied Technical Services near the Thruway exit at Carrier Circle.
   What happened? How could my hard drive die? How could I have ignored the need to back up my files?
   Or, as my conscience keeps asking me, how could I have been so stupid?
   The drive got hit for reasons that aren't clear. The drive could have been bad. But my main Windows PC also died within two days of my Mac's calamity, so I'm not at all sure whether something knocked both of them out or whether the guy upstairs timed these two coincidences to remind me to get a life.
   But the fact is that I lost not just my beloved G4 but my workhorse PC, too.
   There's more. Don't think that I was just unlucky. I was truly dumb.
   Because I thought I was being real smart a few months ago. Instead of backing up my two big computers to something like a tape drive or an external hard disk -- I have both, by the way, so don't let me off the hook with sympathy -- I decided to back each one up to the other.
   Yep, you heard that right. I threw gasoline on the fire. I made it a point to copy my important Mac files to my main Windows PC, and I was careful to copy my important PC files to my Mac.
   What a clever idea! They'd never both go bad at the same time. Right?
   OK, stop telling me I'm a nut. It hurts enough as it is.
   I didn't lose any of my digital photos -- I save them to CDs as soon as I get them off the camera -- and I didn't lose the stuff I write, which is also stuck on CDs here and there.
   But I lost a lot of mail. I lost a lot of little notes I had made. I do that a lot. Whenever I see something interesting, I make a note of it. That stuff flew away. I'll never see it again.
   So I'll just make more notes. A lot of it's in my head anyway.
   Computers are just things. Accidents happen. Life is more than stuff like this.
   That's all true. But pardon me for feeling a little embarrassed. I'm supposed to know better.