When the Back-Up Crashes
|What do you do when your back up crashes? I’ll tell you what I did.. Freak out! Most of my crap stuff are backed up on DVDs and my .5 TB MyBook external. Had I known how crappy fragile the MyBook was, I would’ve jumped on my annual back up a lot sooner.
Here’s the scope: I bought my MyBook back in July off eBay. The “one year” warranty expired in October. But I haven’t gotten there yet…
January 17th, while moving my computer to RugDoctor underneath it, my poor little MyBook takes a tiny little spill from the top of my computer to the carpeted floor. Two foot drop at most, honest.
January 18th at 02:00 (wee hours in the morning on my BIRTHDAY), I decide I should do a quick birthday comic to let everyone know I am well and give them something to read. Lo and behold, my little MyBook tries to tell me that my MyArt folder doesn’t exist. (“WTFBBQsauce? I just double clicked on it, of COURSE it exists!“)
I then proceed as any person who has spent endless hours on the telephone with Tech Support; I unplug the drive, restart my computer, and plug it back in. Windows recognized that there is a USB drive plugged in, but no way to access it. (“oRLY?“)
Restart again, leaving the drive plugged in. My computer nearly dies. In a panic (again, wee hours of my BIRTHDAY), I call a more technical savvy friend of mine that I knew would be awake at the time, we determine that it is in fact the drive that is the problem and my computer is not dead.
Relief washes over me, and then I realize… That I hadn’t done my annual disc back-up, and I have photos of my artwork on there that was recently destroyed in the flooding of my mother’s basement. Panic sets back in, TS (for Tech-Savvy) assures me that he will look at it in the morning.
Hours later, amid chores and preparing for birthday celebration, I hand over my drive, and we discover the warranty is up… And attempt to access the data. After a few days of scanning, TS found font files (in the wrong folder) before the hard drive nearly melted itself.
Conclusion: Externals are not a fail-safe. Western Digital makes crap fragile drives that could easily destroy everything you hold dear. Oh, and their warranty policy for a year is just lame.
