Sad story

Ok, it's not really that sad in the grand scheme of things, mostly just frustrating. So anyways, after viewing sister's MacBook with envy, we decided to get one last August. We love her. Now we don't fight over who gets the laptop, we fight over who gets THAT laptop. Not really, but we do love it. Fast forward several months, January, I think, and Ashley had a tragic week when their hard-drive crashed. "Sad," thinks I, "I wonder why it crashed when it was so young...only about a year old? Good thing they had AppleCare....we don't have AppleCare. We should back up all that we have on our little lovey. Well, if we don't abuse our computer, it should be fine, after all, we've had iBook for years without problem." (Knowing, of course that our little six month-old darling has endured much more abuse than Ashley and Eric's ever will).

Fast forward again to early last week (at which time I had all but forgotten the Incident), Ashley calls me again with the news that their hard-drive has crashed yet again and had to be replaced. Fortunately after the previous episode they had started backing up everything, so the losses were minimal other than reinforcing their decision to extend AppleCare. At this point I've started to worry. We don't backup regularly, and when it comes down to it, very infrequently. Later that day, I talked to 'Chung on the phone and convinced him to order an external hard-drive to enable us to back-up our computers. He promptly found a good/relatively inexpensive one and ordered it. I was so happy on Tuesday when it arrived; no longer would I have to worry that we'd lose all of our digital content (mostly pictures). You can see where this is going, right? Should have put those pictures on DVD right then.

Later that afternoon 'Chung started to back up the computer to the new hard-drive using this fancy program Apple has called Time Machine...sounds so sci fi, right? He came back to it when he expected it to be done and found that the computer had crashed after completing only half of the back-up. All attempts to revive it failed, and soon it was off to the Apple Store to wait for a spot at the Genius Bar (without an appointment, which, I don't know about where you are, but around here that's night unto impossible). After waiting until just before they closed, 'Chung talked to an Apple employee who did whatever they do and returned with the bad news: the drive was fried beyond any hope of recovery. Small consolation to me, they did give us a new hard-drive since the computer was still under the normal one-year warranty. 'Chung went home to see if he could recover what had been captured by the back-up before the crash only to discover that Time Machine converts the files to a different format and he could not access the partial back-up since it didn't complete.

Grr. Lesson learned--I hope.

The good new is, 'Chung had backed up the pictures to DVD in early Jan., so we have the ones before that and it was sometime late Feb. that the digital camera died, so everything we've taken since then we have negatives for, which means we only lost about 6-8 weeks worth of pics. I guess, all things considered we didn't loose that much that's irreplaceable, and I figure if I can't think of any of the other documents or files on that computer, I probably won't miss them.