Backup, backup, backup…

You know I’ve always thought that some people were a bit obsessed with making back up copies of everything on their computer. I suppose after having apple macs for many years that don’t crash or get viruses lulls you into a false sense of security. That was until last month when my main hard drive stuffed up and was unreadable.

I noticed a few strange things going on with the computer like high pitched noises and it was a bit slow etc. So I decided to do a disk utility ” Repair disk” by starting up from my original OSX 10.4 Installation disc to see if that would fix it. Bad move…

The hard drive must have been on the verge of crashing because it got through about 3 quarters of the way & then stopped with the alert ” Drive reported error: Sense key = Hardware error. Internal target failure”

When I tried to restart the G4, it wouldn’t get past the grey apple logo… Oh oh… So next I thought I would go get a new 160GB hard drive & install a nice new OSX installation onto it. That worked & I was back up & running, but it looked like I had lost all my data on the old main hard drive as it was unreadable. So I tried good old trusty Disc Warrior, which thankfully, was able to scan & read the broken hard disk and I was able to drag & drop my old user account onto the new hard drive.

I ended up losing nothing, but for a while there I thought all our photo’s, music, movies, bookmarks, emails etc were gone. Like a lot of things in life, you don’t realise how important they are to you until you think they’re gone for good.

So the moral to the story is if you have anything you can’t afford to lose on your computer, backup regularly… cause it can be all gone at any moment.