Ok, maybe not literally “tomorrow” as on October 16th, 2007.
But it will die at some point in the future.
That’s what they do. That’s what happens.
(Note: although I talk about several Apple products and Mac software, this post really isn’t about Apple or Mac OS X. It’s about being prepared for the when not if of your hard drive dying.)
If you are a Mac user and are not using either or , you’re an idiot.
I know, because I stand among you as one of you.
Oh I have SuperDuper. I had even used it, as recently as a week before my hard drive died. Which places me in a pretty small group of people with actual working backups.
However, in the intervening week I downloaded about 100 pictures and several short videos from my wife’s digital camera after she and our son spent a week with a friend in Virginia Beach.
Say it with me: IDIOT.
Not that SuperDuper didn’t try to tell me. I have it scheduled to backup every night. Every night it would pop up and say “Hey, I tried to make the backup like you asked, but you didn’t hook up the backup drive!” (I’m using a laptop.)
I just ignored it.
After all, the drive isn’t that old (a year in August) and it’s a good brand (Seagate Momentus, same brand that Apple uses in their laptops).
Then one day it just started making a terrible, terrible noise.
Then the laptop froze up.
And that was it.
Dead.
I tried various tricks to get it to work long enough to get just a few files off of it.
Nope.
Fortunately I had the pictures on my iPhone, and was able to download them, but they were in ithmb format. Since Apple has decided not to let you use the iPhone as a hard drive (despite every other iPod being usable as one), you can’t store full resolution pictures on your iPhone. If you could have, I would have had the missing pictures (but not the videos) on my iPhone.
The next problem is that the only program I could find the read ithmb files was , a $15 utility which helps Mac users get at all sorts of files. I had actually looked at it before but had never needed it.
I was able to download a demo, but it didn’t seem to work. Desperate, I emailed the developer.
(Given that the programmer lives in Denmark, where there are no iPhones as of yet, this limitation is completely understandable.)
He emailed me back and asked me to send him one of the ithmb files, which I did.
The next day he emailed me back an updated version of the app which could extract the iPhone ithmb files.
Now these are much lower resolution pictures than the originals, but they are much higher resolution than my backups — which you will remember consisted of zero pixels because I hadn’t made backups.
Compared with hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in hard drive recovery, or losing the pictures forever, $15 seemed like a good deal.
So learn from my mistake:
Step 1) Get backup software.
Step 2) Use it. Daily. At least.
Speaking of good deals, I realize that costs $30 and is free. To me it was a no-brainer. Backups are worth $30 to make sure that someone is dedicating to offering support, and the folks at Shirt-Pocket.com are great when it comes to support. The CarbonCopyCloner folks may be great folks, but at the end of the day I feel a little more secure with a paid solution. YMMV. The point is you need to be doing this on a daily/nightly basis with an app you can trust.
My new solution? I bought another 2.5 inch 160gb SATA drive (the same size as the one that died) and an external case for 2.5 SATA drives. When I get the Seagate back after its warranty replacement, I will use not just the backup drive that I have already (which I will probably keep at the office and have itself update daily a noon) but I can also keep the other drive in my laptop bag and when (not if) my internal drive dies again, I will be able to simply swap it out and replace it. Downtime should be less than 15 minutes. Total cost?
$100 for the 160GB SATA drive. $30 for the external SATA case. $30 for SuperDuper
$160 (and I had already bought SuperDuper, so really the cost was $130).
Compare that to what I did this time:
1) Drive to Columbus (2 hours) 2) Get replacement drive 3) Drive home (2 hours) 4) Find out original replacement drive was bad (I was having a lot of bad luck that week) 5) Drive to Columbus again 2 days later (2 hours) 6) Get replacement drive 7) Drive home (2 hours)
Note that had I ordered the drive and case online I probably would have waited at least 2-3 days for shipping, so this was about as fast as I could get it done unless I lived in a big enough city to be able to pop into a computer store and find an SATA laptop drive at a competitive price (which isn’t every big city. This isn’t something you will find at Best Buy).
Would avoiding all of that hassle be worth $130?
Probably more. Factor in the cost of your time and gas, and I probably would have saved more even if I had bought a second drive when prices were higher.
So that’s my backup strategy.
What’s yours? It is more than “Gee I hope my hard drive lives forever!” or “I’m sure I’ll have plenty of warning before my drive dies!”
Some hard drives may slowly slip into that great beyond, but some have a sudden massive heart attack and are gone in the blink of an eye.