Ever since the incident which I will not speak of, I’ve become rather obsessive about backing up data and not dropping hard drives – hey, I’ve only dropped two in the last month. Now The Woman knows to stay out of my way and not bug me at the computer with the simple phrase “I”m checking the backups”. In other words, unless you want every memory of your niece and nephew to disappear, just go back to watching TV.
And thus I found myself importing new photos this Sunday morning from the nonstop Thanksgiving weekend. It’s a multi-step process designed to confuse and astound passerbys and leave me with copies on as many devices as possible. And so when device number one stopped working, I got pretty nervous – we haven’t even gotten to the real meat of the process and it’s already bugging out. Of course, it turns out to be my own clumsiness as I partially yanked the USB cable out. After re-attaching, the photos get imported and the process continues with me just a little closer to death.
Then I start the master backup, wherein everything is duplicated onto two more drives in an array. My brain and heart stopped for about a minute towards the end as I heard the dreaded clicking noise. Great! Yet another drive goes belly up! But… why is everything still copying? Hmm… I wonder if that graduation tassel swinging from the side of my monitor could be simulating a failed hard drive sound as it bangs the casing of said hard drive… Well, what’s a few more gray hairs?
When all is said and done, Monday morning I come down to do some less important backups. Oddly, however, the system isn’t letting me view the backup drive. You know, the beautiful RAID array that holds my life. Probably just needs to be restarted… except now it won’t turn back on. Let’s flick a switch… now it’s on and still won’t be recognized… now I’m getting worried. Let’s switch from firewire to USB… wow, there’s everything. And running much more smoothly.
In summary, the universe is out to destroy me and has at least succeeded in taking a few years off of my life.