I’ve had a pretty wild/busy start to 2018 – between my younger daughter turning 21 a week before Christmas, Christmas, and my elder daughter’s birthday a week after new years, there were 3 pretty wild storms that dropped a lot of water and some impressive lightning on Christmas Day and the following few days (with some minor flooding in my backyard). I *was* planning on spending that lovely quiet (for a home based business) week between Christmas and New Year catching up and setting up for the next few months.
But the universe had other plans. I woke to on 30 December to a nasty little question mark on the monitor … I’ve seen this before and it’s usually a case of doing a ‘special’ reboot, and you’re good to go. Well, nope … that didn’t work and I just had that feeling in my bones that it was a bit more serious. And it was. Total hard drive failure. Total. That is something I’ve not encountered before – I’m a Mac person, and despite the rabbit hole of Apple IDs, multiple logins and iCloud, they’re pretty solid.
So before proceeding with repairs, I wanted to test the backup that I did have by restoring to the laptop. This required a specific cable which wasn’t an option on the laptop (USB yes, but firewire no!) … eeerrrggg. Until I tested that restore, I wasn’t prepared to say ‘nope, just do a new hard drive’, or ‘yup, let’s spend $1,200 on trying to recover the data’ (that wasn’t guaranteed). Rabbit hole! Eventually I was able to connect to the backup wirelessly and could see all the files were there. A small win!!
So, a few more days without a computer while I waited for a new hard drive which was going to take anywhere from 1-3 weeks another eerrrggg! It’s challenging doing design work on the laptop – the screen is just too small for me, but it sort of worked. Sort of! The other issue that I hadn’t expected was missing software applications. Most of what I use are cloud based, eg Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop etc), Freshbooks, Last Pass, etc, but I didn’t realise there were a couple of critical apps just on my desktop one of which helps me track domains, and cPanel passwords. I’m still working on alternative solutions so everything critical to the business is cloud based but perhaps some of this information is better kept local. A small win was that it did only take a smidge over a week to get the desktop computer back.
Thank goodness I had a Time Capsule backup and much of my work is on Dropbox, but doing a full restore to the desktop computer proved as problematic as it did on the laptop. It just didn’t want to work and no-one can tell my why. The forums turned up quite a few people with the same issue, but not many solutions.Ultimately, I’veprobably spent 3 full days restoring files manually, ie transferring 90,000+ files to the new hard drive. I still have a fair chunk of music and photos to go. But at least I know they’re all there in backups. Phew!
So all of this made me think about how we manage backups, disaster recovery and what to do when it goes pear shaped! I’ve now checked all of my backup process which I hadn’t reviewed for at least a year and short of testing it (which I will do soon) I think it’s all good.
- Do you backup your computer? I’m not talking about your website, but your physical computer.
- Do you have a routine that runs preferably automagically and regularly?
- Have you tested it?
Chances are you don’t necessarily need *everything* but when you think about how much of our lives live on various devices – phones, tablets, desktop computers – it can be devastating when you have to deal with hardware failure. My Time Capsule backups run daily, weekly and monthly. I have plenty of space (2 terrabytes) and have added an extra terrabyte to my Dropbox and have now set up the backups to work wirelessly so the desktop, laptop, and some of the ‘cloud’ space is backed up automatically.
I can only suggest to you that you check that you have a backup of whatever is on your computer. Do it now! Include it in your business plan or at least document it and keep those notes with other business documents. A hard copy 🙂
That is it for my whinge for the year. I am now sending good thoughts to the Universe for this to be the a blip of angst re technology that is it for the year (or at least a while!), and I’m looking forward to doing that catching up and setting up that I had planned on doing a couple of weeks ago!
May you all have good fortune and a brilliant year (with backups in place)!
PS the pic in the cat has absolutely nothing to do with this story except that he looks as forlorn as I felt in that week the computer went kaput!!
