Life and it’s little intracacies. Just as work started to slow down to “Barely Manageable”, I strolled in from walking Photon to find my computer—which should have been asleep—running all of its fans at the volume of a vacuum cleaner. The hard drive had failed.
From there, it has devolved into a series of episodes much like Fortunately, a book I loved as a kid: Fortunately, the computer is fine, unfortunately there is a mechanical flaw and physical damage to the hard drive. Fortunately I do backup, and had backed up important work files relatively recently; unfortunately I have been not as rigourous at saving my email and iPhoto library with all the family snaps in it. Fortunately there is a reasonably priced data recovery service in our neighbourhood; unfortunately reasonable price means something different in the data recovery world.
You get the idea. I’ll learn the extent of the loss in the next day. C’est la vie. But let me be a lesson to you. Oh, I had excuses too, I had a big pile of DVDs out to back everything up. I put it off one day too long. Don’t be me. (Brought to you by the National I-Told-You-So Council.)
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Reid says:
May 24, 2007 at 11:42 am (UTC 0)
Here’s my mini-rant onusing IMAP for mail and keeping your mail on the server.
Most mail programs are set up by default to download all your mail from the server and store it in handy little mailboxes on your hard disk. Do Not Do This.
IMAP means you can keep all your mailboxes on the server. BUT, they are not *just* on the server. They are on every machine on which you use a mail program to access your mail as well. Mail.app and others keep a local cache of mail around for speedy access. This, in effect, gives you involuntary backups. In your case, you would be able to (and should) read your mail from Laura’s or Jon’s machine every now and then. I read mail on my Powerbook. Bang – instant mail backup.
As an extra added feature, it’s possible to access your mail via web if it’s set up right (I use SquirrelMail).
Here endeth the rant. 🙂 In summary: IMAP means never having to say you lost your email.
David "Unfortunately, Been In The Neighbourhood" Barker says:
May 24, 2007 at 1:37 pm (UTC 0)
Fortunately, I got luckier than I deserve to be.
Best of as much luck as you can pay for. And listen to Reid; sometimes he’s right.
Peter says:
May 24, 2007 at 7:07 pm (UTC 0)
Thanks, Reid! Post-warned is well, post-armed.