Lightning Strikes Twice
Yesterday I mentioned that about a month ago I lost a lot of financial and submission history to a corrupted hard drive. Fortunately I didn’t have on-going work on there, or where I did I also had it on USB or on one or other (or both) of my laptops. I generally back up about once a week, although this slips to about once a fortnight when I’m busy, which of course is when things go wrong…
…like the power surge that we had on Thursday. No more than a momentary flicker of the lights, but the old Vaio –which has bugger all battery capacity—was plugged into the mains to recharge, and it was on, since I’d copied one file onto USB. Doubly vulnerable.
To cut a long story short, it’s showing exactly the same symptoms as the desktop. That cost me £120 and I still lost all the data on it. After a January in which our catalytic convertor failed (£450) I needed varifocals (£260) and the corrupted desktop (£120) it’s a bill too far; especially if the data’s lost.
Or at least some of it is.
The casualties are an almost finished guest blog for Aliette de Bodard, and a review for Suite101 which was two paragraphs short of completion. That’s the biggest loss – almost 900 words completely gone into limbo. But two other guest blogs were on the USB, as was everything else I’ve been working on, so I actually got off lightly.
So it’s the blog that’s suffered, but it’s not as bad as it could be.
What’s worse is that most of the photos Kate has taken over the last six or seven years were on the desktop, and while some of them were duplicated and appear elsewhere, having lost two-thirds of our photos, we’ve probably lost two-thirds of the remainder.
Chaz mentioned using a drop box, which is certainly an option I’ll look at — we haven’t the space physically for half the stuff we have here, and we need to find some way of storing memories that isn’t vulnerable to the whims of Western Power.
But don’t believe the old maxim that says lightning never strikes twice. It does.
