the corner office

Hard drive crash. Normally diligent backup system less diligently applied in light of recent hardware shuffles, and my redundant copies of everything ended up on spare partitions of the same drive. Pending the arrival of a new drive, that didn't arrive soon enough, sadly.

I dropped the drive off with a data recovery crowd for a free assessment of the chances of salvaging the drive - and found out today that it just ain't happening.

So, I try to be as zen about it as I can, and realise that apart from some stuff that's fallen through the cracks, the majority of the most crucial data was already written to DVDs and CDs. That doesn't mean I haven't lost a lot of crap, but the more I think through it, the more I realise that it's exactly that - crap. Sure, I spent a lot of time accumulating some of the crap I've lost, but just as often that crap is stuff I'd never touch or think about, again.

Well, my drive died last week (hence the lack of blogging, since my Notes data dir was one of the victims, and I was holding out hoping I wouldn't need to set up a new client, replicate my blog back down again, etc etc), and by and large my world hasn't fallen apart. I'll slowly but surely start filling up the 2 new 200 gig drives I bought this week, and I'm pretty sure I'll be a busload more careful in what and how I handle backups in future, but at the end of the day, bleh. Waaay back in 1997 I moved from my Apple Powerbook to a PC. That old Powerbook still has a lot of stuff on it, and in the past 7 years I've been in no big rush to get to it. As morbed out as I feel, deep down I know it's the same thing. I've been in no rush to dig through old backup CDs to see just what I have and don't have. Nice to hoard, but not the end of the world if you don't have it.

Yes, I'm trying to put on a brave face. Humour me.