Monday, March 29, 2010

Real Life Tao - Be Prepared

I'm sure a good many people are familiar with the Boy Scout motto, Be Prepared. In general terms, it's not a bad concept. A person who is prepared for all types of situations and circumstances generally will fare better than those who encounter the same scenarios and are unprepared.

I use this preface as a backdrop to a particular circumstance I find myself in today. Owing to a similar situation nearly one decade ago, I changed the way I do things so as to be better prepared. Unfortunately, preparation can only take a person so far.

Back in 2001, I experienced a crash of my computer. I lost nearly 8 years of data as it was quickly determined by computer technicians that my hard drive was irretrievably dead. This represented a catastrophe of epic proportions for me because I was the archivist and treasurer for several organizations. A lot of organizational history, brochures, a plethora of templates and assorted key information was lost in the blink of an eye.

I vowed never to let this happen again. When I purchased a new computer, I added a second hard drive to the package. I utilized this second drive as my insurance policy by performing daily backups of my system and key data. In a way, it became sort of like the double entry system used in accounting. Any important piece of data was housed in two locations.

When I began experiencing computer problems earlier this month, my mind was put a bit more at ease because I knew that, if one drive failed, the other drive could be utilized quickly to resurrect the data. So, as I realized the time had come to reformat my main hard drive, I rested assured that I could put all the data back onto the cleaned drive.

For all this preparation, I stand before you today with hat in hand. I find myself in the same situation as before -- years of data appear lost. My back-up of this blog is gone. I no longer have many of your email addresses. Years of family financial data is not accessible.

How could this happen, you ask. Well, I've figured out my chief computer problem -- the back-up drive was failing. This, it turns out, was the chief cause of all the freeze ups and rebooting.

I discovered this by accident. As I scrambled to figure out the woeful state of my computer two weeks ago, I tried numerous strategies. One was to disconnect the slave drive. Since I did this one small act, there have been no more freeze ups. Not one.

My suspicions were confirmed after I successfully loaded Puppy Linux as my new operating system. Four days ago I reconnected the second hard drive for the sole purpose of pulling the data out of it to see if I could save it back to the master drive. When I booted up, I received a flashing message: Drive B in imminent danger of failure!! What Windows couldn't seem to discern, Linux picked up on immediately.

Despite my daily practice of backing up my data, it now appears I've lost all of it, nonetheless. (I say appears solely because there is an outside possibility that folks at a local computer shop may still be able to extract some of it.) I wiped the data off of one drive and, unbeknownst to me, it was my second drive that was about ready to crash.

The lesson here is painfully obvious: preparation doesn't prepare us for every given situation. While it is a good practice to follow, we must be ever mindful that there are some circumstances we adequately can't prepare for. More importantly, the appearance of preparedness can give us a false sense of security. We may think we're prepared for each and every eventuality when, in fact, we aren't.

While I am yet again aggrieved at losing my key data, I am not as devastated as before. I now realize that data isn't life itself and it can always be reconstituted in some form. It won't be as it was before, but life is about change and this is a change I will simply have to deal with as best I can.

(I think I'll get some sort of zip drive.)

This post is part of a series. For an introduction, go here.

7 comments:

  1. That's a good lesson everyone should heed. Never use an active device as your primary backup. I have an external HD that I backup to incrementally but I religiously back it up to DVD once a month at minimum. A DVD, tape drive or even a large solid state device is the only true safe backup and technically it should be kept in a different place than your computer or even off site.

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  2. Sorry to hear that you lost your data.

    Rather than going for a ZIP drive...

    1. Start saving your data under a single directory structure (My Documents) and back that up to CD/DVD ROM.

    CD/DVD is cheap. You can't accidentally erase it and if one doesn't work, don't worry because you probably have a stack of old ones you can use.

    Secondly. I know you don't trust online services but my suggestion to store your contacts online still stands.

    If you had all your emails and contacts in GMail, then they'd all still be there.

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  3. argh! i wrote several stories and poetry that i would be devastated if they got lost. thankfully i have them backed up on cds so that when my computer crashed i had them all backed up. some music albums were lost, because i forgot to back them up, but that's relatively minimal damage.
    i hate computer failures! however they are pretty damn common.

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  4. The chief reason I didn't use cds for backing up data in Windows was that my Boggle game was always in the cd drive. ;) I haven't tried to see if it will work in Linux (with wine). If it doesn't, then I can more readily heed the advice offered since the drive will typically be vacant.

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  5. Having your boggle CD in the drive isn't a great excuse. I always make it a point to locate nocd cracks for my games.

    If I've bought it, then I'm entitled to run it without risking destroying the CD by having it constantly in the drive.

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  6. another way to quickly save word documents and the occasional stray picture is to attach it to an email and email it to yourself, if you have a yahoo or hotmail (etc) account. you can access email from any computer so if your computer fails then you still have a copy.

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