Meet Silver and Tough

I would like you to introduce you to my two new best friends in the whole wide world:

These guys are going to be my closest companions to whom I will share all of my secrets.

I will not even consider writing a sentence, filming a clip, or even shooting a picture without first consulting with these two amazing, multitasking, computer heroes.

Yes, Silver and Tough are backup external hard drives. While it may seem weird to need to NAME my computer equipment, I beg to differ.

We name pets because they provide us love, affection, drool, and pet hair.

I get so much more from my backup drive: loyalty, punctuality, personal dedication, and a continual desire to work hard for my affection.

I think that’s more than enough reason to name my hard drives!

Obviously I’ve turned over a new leaf when it comes to backing up my information. In case you’re just tuning in, here’s a little recap of what happened last month:

I got a cold for the 2nd week in a row and rather than turn off my computer like a good little girl, I instead drug it to bed with me like a rather weird comfort blanket.

The idea was that, while prone, I could still edit all the videos for the dvd I was working on.

But in order to edit the videos, I needed my backup harddrive to come with me because I’d rather naively trusted it with ALL of my video files, family photos, and several rough draft articles.

So I set up my computer on my trusty laptop table and set the hard drive on the table to my right and connected the two with a USB cord.

Of course it was only a matter of time before nature called and I needed to get back out of bed.

This is when the fatal mistake happened.

Instead of setting the computer to the right where everything would be fine, I instead set it to the left, jerking the USB cord, which in turn jerked the hard drive off the table where it then promptly smashed first into the wooden side of the bed, and then crashed to the floor.

As soon as I heard the crash I thought “That sounded expensive.” And it was.

This drive just happened to contain ALL of my videos from day 1 – day 125, plus the other 30 videos I’d shot on random stuff that I hadn’t edited yet.

All the videos I’d previously edited, the whole volume 4 and 5 dvds which were already edited for DVD.

And of course, all of the family photos and videos we’d taken for the last 2 years. This last is what really hurts the most. There’s no price you can put on a picture of your 2 year old doing something sweet and endearing.

Why were these videos and photos ONLY on this one drive? Great question!

Unfortunately, I really don’t have a decent answer for that completely stupid mistake. Part of the reason was because my laptop was running out of space quick, so I dumped my whole documents folder into the drive to open up space.

Also it was laziness. It’s just plain easy to save things in one place and not bother copying them to another folder on another drive. *sigh* I’ve learned my lesson.

I attempted to get the information back from 2 computer wizards, but both returned saying that the drive was too badly broken to retrieve the information.

They did suggest sending the drive to bigger, more amazingly talented computer wizards, but the price was going to run between $1200-$1400. Ouch!

I was teetering on the fence, trying hard to decide whether to just recycle the drive and be done with it or go with these ultra computer wizards and see what they could do.

But then I got a phone call from one of the computer people and his exact words were “Highly unlikely that you will be able to get ANY information back, and what you do get back will likely be corrupted.”

Ah! Well, that made the decision easy. What’s the good of spending a small fortune to retrieve information that won’t even work?

So that original backup drive has been recycled and I’ve decided to move on.

And who should I find on sale today? Silver! This slim, beautiful drive is a Seagate Free Agent Desk drive with a whooping 1 TETRABYTE of information.

But I’ve learned my lesson from backing up in only one place. Never, ever again.

This is why I need Tough. This is a Hitachi Simple Tough 500 mb hard drive that is both water resistant and shock resistant.

If I knock this guy off the table, he’ll just bounce! This little drive is covered with a thick sheet of rubber and, though lightweight, feels very sturdy and heavy duty.

This will be the drive that I store my working files on (copies of course on Silver). I need a drive I can carry with me that’s not as sensitive as my former, smashed drive, who can take a little abuse, but still remain fully functional.

So why have I bothered to share all of this long, rambling story about hard drives on a blog about QUILTING?

Because I learned a very important lesson and I don’t want you to have to learn it too!

Even if you don’t work on your computer, losing pictures, documents, or even just music files can be devastating.

Don’t make the mistake I did! It’s a very hard lesson to learn, but once you lose it all once, you’ll never want to lose everything again.

Also for extra security, I’m considering buying a third drive to back up with once a month and store out of the house in a safe deposit box at the bank.

I know this may seem like a little overkill, but I really think it’s a good idea. What if my house burned down or was broken into? What if everything was taken or destroyed?

I’d rather be safe than sorry and even 3 drives and a safe deposit box is cheaper than what it would cost to try to retrieve all the information I lost from the original drive.

So with this lesson learned, Let’s go quilt!

Leah Day