Lightspeed Blog

I have something quite important to talk about (namely this) but it’s going to take me a while to collect my thoughts and explain it properly. In the meantime here’s a cautionary tale about the perils of not backing up your data.

A few months ago my ageing external hard drive started making an odd clicking noise whenever it was left on for too long. Puzzlement grew to worry as I realised my precious data may be in jeopardy - and this particular drive was where my mp3 collection resided. Some of those files date back to the era of Napster, and as such I’ve grown quite attached to them. Since I didn’t have anywhere to transfer the files to, I took the safe route and stopped using the drive until I could safely rescue the data.

Cut forward to April, my birthday - friends from college get me a Network Attached Storage device and two 500GB hard drives (thanks, guys!). Now that I had oodles of delicious hard drive space, it was time to rescue those files. I turned on the drive and quickly copied the mp3s to their new location, watching them transfer anxiously. It was a nail-biting few minutes, but fortunately the transfer finished with no problems. Huzzah! I decided to have a celebratory dinner straight away, and salvage what other files I could from the drive later on.

When I returned to my room, belly full and mind at ease, there was an unholy sound coming from the hard drive (I had forgotten to turn it off). I wish I had had the presence of mind to record it so I could show you how badly the drive was mutilating itself, but my first priority was making sure no explosions occurred. After turning off the drive, I took it apart to perform my autopsy.

Notice the melted plastic.

Now, notice the close proximity of the drive to the bin.

Seems it’s dead… which is a shame, but also a wake up call. Stuff physically breaks sometimes! With this abrupt and jarring loss as a catalyst, I finally got around to burning a backup of all my important files (college work, web design projects, etc.) It spanned three DVDs, totalling about 12GB of data - who knew I had so much important stuff!