The past week has been full of adventures of sort. I regretably got very sick and have been knocked out by a bad cold. I’m still fighting it off and hope that you can avoid it. The past week has passed me by like the years passing by Rip van Winkle. It seems like only yesterday that I laid down not feeling so hot.
Regrettably when I did get up I ended up dealing with a catastrophic hard drive failure and am still working my way through it. I’ve been very paranoid about this very thing happening and I’ve been backing up my production drive (a mirrored pair of 750 GB drives) to DVD. None the less you can never back up everything and the one thing I omitted to backed up (as in duplicated onto a 3rd drive) for several weeks was my latest and largest Lightroom library. While I deal with the downtime of my production drive and work to recover one of the two mirrors (assuming one copy is good) I recommend you take the time to regularly duplicate your critical data on a regular basis this year.
Oh and what makes this so painful. I had just purchased a new 5-bay drive enclosure and purchased (5) 1TB drives. This enclosure had been set up 2 days before the drive failure. Unfortunately for me the drives had an issue and I was unable to duplicate my production drive. Sometimes things just don’t work out no matter how hard you try.
As you’d imagine until this is resolved I won’t be pumping out new images. I’m more committed now than ever before to have a solid backup system in place. I thought I was on track to have it, but got thrown a curveball. If all goes well I’ll have this resolved in the next day or two.
With all this happening I had some extra time on my hands, so I took time out of my day today to watch the U.S. Presidential inauguration. What an amazing time in history to witness. Both my wife and I took the time to watch this mornings ceremony and I’ve been blown away by the gravity of this day. No matter what your political leaning to witness this historic occasion and the passion of the people taking it in is nothing short of amazing. I can only hope that each year that passes from this day on are significantly better than those that came before.
Inaugural Preparation – The Big Picture
Photo Op: A President’s Farewell – CBS News
Obama Inauguration – Chicago Tribune
Presidential Inauguration – Yahoo News
Inauguration 2009 – Flickr
My personal favorite…
That really sucks about the drive (and being sick too). I’m curious what drive enclosure you bought, and what software you plan to use to manage it. Will it be a live working drive, or just a place to backup your files to?
@Sean Give me a day to get things up and running and I’ll share the details. I should get new drives today and have everything configured / backed up by tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
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Jim:
So sorry to hear about the recent woes. As for the illness, mine is still fresh in the mind, as it took three weeks to work it’s way through my family. I described it as a really severe cold; more like a fever, but without the fever or loss of appetite.
As for the HD, that really sucks. But it seems like we all go through this as well at some point; we learn for a while, get better with our back-up strategies, get lax, and eventually repeat. Hope it all gets resolved soon.
@Gary Thanks. Fortunately for me bad timing and all I got things sorted out per my blog post today. As for the cold… the bug that is going around is particularly bad. I’m glad to hear everyone is over it in your household. I’m on week two of the cold and feeling better, but I’m definitely not 100%. At least I can function. My poor wife is suffering from it at the moment and she’s lucky if she can get a good nights rest.
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