Death and Unlikely Resurrection
22 Mar 2008 | Filed Under: Crankypants + Domesticities
I’m aware of the fact that this is an ironic weekend for this to have happened, but my work computer has officially keeled over and died. This is doubly ironic given that I was vaguely aware all was not well in Computerville, and just yesterday procured an enormous USB stick so I could back up my current projects folder.
Sticking the USB key into the computer? Is what finally killed it.
This is apparently a malady stemming from peripherals. It started with an increadibly troublesome printer that would freeze my entire system with each communication attempt to or from the PC, and finally ended in a blaze of absolute nothingness with the aforementioned USB issue.
There is a long day of mountaineering level rescue attempts ahead of my husband, but I am not terribly hopeful that this is going to end well. And on the off chance that this story does have some kind of happy ending, it is unlikely to be a quick one.
The real issue, however, is that all of my current projects in progress for all pending clients are locked on that dead hard drive. Even if this all gets sorted by the end of the long bank holiday weekend, a forced vacation during repairs is going to mean an enormously crunched work load, even if this event doesn’t mean starting completely from scratch for every single project.
Fortunately, I thrive on disasters, so it will all come good one way or another.
Unfortunately, if I promised you something this weekend, it is unlikely to appear. I will look at everyone’s deadlines, reshuffle in order of deadline priority, and get everything out early next week. When I know what the production schedule looks like, everyone will get an email from me so we can be sure nobody is being pushed to a new deadline that isn’t going to work for them.
I am, of course, very sorry this has happened and will do everything possible to make all of the pain mine and virtually none of it anyone else’s.
The last irony is that of course, I do have a back-up system in place. I back up all accepted layouts, all production designs and code, and every iteration in between. What I don’t back up is the 32 versions I go through before I send someone a suggested design. It just happened to work out that right now, I have about six clients in this awkward pre-production phase.
And yes, you can bet that the new computer system, in whatever incarnation, will involve a nightly, if not hourly, new back-up routine.
Anthony says:
Sorry to hear that Sabrina. Did the hard drive unit itself fail?
Saturday, 22 March, 2008, 12:13 pmConor O'Neill says:
Always bloody happens at the worst time doesn’t it? And then you discover that all the DVD backups are corrupt!
We’ve started using JungleDisk on all our machines now. If Amazon can’t store it securely then who can? Obviously using SVN for versioning (and looking at bzr).
Hope it come back up quickly for you.
Saturday, 22 March, 2008, 2:48 pmJohn Handelaar says:
Windows XP, which I’m constantly told is more ‘user friendly’ than (say) Linux, cannot be repaired without basically a forced reinstall.
Because it stores everything remotely valuable in an opaque monolithic ‘registry’ instead of plain-text config files stored in a predictable location like (say) Ubuntu, when one of its subsystems dies on its arse you have two choices:
a) Reinstall Windows and lose everything, and not even be able to run any apps still on the disk, or
b) Keep the registry in toto, which will definitely render the broken USB subsystem still broken even after you’ve spent 24 hours trying to repair the stupid POS.
Don’t forget to factor in the additional joy of being forced to submit to a retinal scan and a rectal search by Windowsen Genuinen Producten Activationen Reichsgesellschaft EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME you try to ‘Add Hardware’ in an attempt to get the OS to pick up its own motherboard.
Saturday, 22 March, 2008, 3:59 pmjunior says:
I presume you’ve tried booting into the Windoze Recovery Console and tried running that John ?
If that doesn’t work, what I’d try to do is download a Knoppix Live CD - burn it to disk, boot the dead machine from it, then copy off all relevant data that you need backed up, then reinstall windows.
You can get a copy of knoppix from http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
Sunday, 23 March, 2008, 11:34 amCronoCloud Creeggan says:
Ditto on the Knoppix idea, having a Knoppix CD/DVD can save your ass. At minimum you can use it to get your files and user directories to a USB mass storage device. Depending on what version you use, you might even be able to work on your stuff via the applications in Knoppix. I know it’s got the GIMP in there.
Sunday, 23 March, 2008, 4:15 pmTom says:
Might be worth looking at apples time machine..
Monday, 31 March, 2008, 10:02 am