August 23, 2010

iMac status

Hard drive failure.

I'm trying to keep the tears to a minimum.

The good news? Supposedly I had an Apple Care plan (I don't remember purchasing it) so they are replacing the hard drive for free. And they just swapped the batteries on my laptop (I don't know why, that thing was purchased in '06. There is no way it is covered!), so I'm not completely lost. Most of my music is loaded on my laptop, and the music I've recently purchased is on my iPhone. All my photos from up to a week after Ry was born are on my laptop. I've got over 400 photos posted on facebook of her (ridiculous, I know). So, even if the magic data recovery man (a guy at apple gave me the phone number) doesn't get anything off my old hard drive, I haven't lost EVERYTHING.

I am short some design files from my business, but I have pdfs in e-mails, so I should be able to easily recreate the files on my laptop. Luckily I had just finished up all of my current invitation projects, so there is nothing that is in need for production in the next week or so.

But I'm still kicking myself for not backing up on an external hard drive like I knew that I should have been doing. I had an external in college. But, I dropped it more than once trying to run across Kentucky street to our house senior year. I'm surprised that it survived until after graduation.

Moral of the story? If you have anything important to you on your computer, BACK IT UP. At least monthly, if not weekly. Burn DVDs. Get an external. Protect your stuff. I can deal with losing my music and my files, but the photos are killing me. I know I have all of my favorites on facebook and the blog, but I want them ALL.

Come on data recovery!

3 comments:

Teresa @ Grammy Girlfriend said...

i thought Macs never broke...I had one for 3 months and sold it...just decided I was too old to learn a new system....I bought Apple Care for my Iphone and have already had to use it several times

Jeane said...

Oh NOOO! That really sucks. I would cry as well if I would lose all the pictures of my girls :-(

Hope the guy can fix it!

Lisa @ Lisa Moves said...

The apartment below us had a fire, nothing was lost, but it made me freak out that even an external drive wouldn't save our stuff. I wanted a web-based service just in case. We joined SugarSync, and yeah, it cost $99 a year....but I have the *entire* contents of both our laptops and over 4000 pictures on there. And, everytime I put a new file or picture on my laptop, its automatically uploaded to SugarSync. I know its not cheap, but I think its totally worth the money.