Won’t You Back That OS Up?

oh what a frightful day yesterday was. here i thought i’d have the whole day to work productively, was feeling it, was up early (as usual), and ready to go. little did i know my entire day would consist of adrenaline and computer terrors.

while the world was warming up and spring was laying down enough fancy footwork to let everyone in the town (funny how some cities just refuse to be assigned the word “city” in my mind) know without a doubt that winter has passed us by again, my computer was locking up, freezing up and in general freaking me out. it took hours to figure out that it was one of my hard drives. i have three external hard drives. that’s what happens when your in-computer HD is 250G (not too bad, tho) but you deal regularly in video and music. video especially takes up TONS of room. (another reason why i lust after the mac pro (tower); it has like four bays for HDs that are 750 each? wow….i turn to jelly just thinking about it. meanwhile, that’s en el futuro.) of course the more connections/drives/layers of software etc you have, the more possibility for conflict and problems.

i wont go into an even longer and more boring story, but suffice it to say that for most of the day, i was worried (this is a polite term) i was going to lose every single file on my largest drive (750G). now granted, some of it is backed up on DVDs. after all, there is everything from my first daughters’ phone messages five years ago, to pictures of my second daughter’s home birth, to master recordings of albums i wrote and recorded fifteen years ago, to finished but unpublished books on that drive. to lose that drive would (almost) be like losing your childhood home in a fire. in terms of (virtual) boxes of precious history and memorabilia and documentation and creative work, that drive is my personal and professional homestead, and carries decades of valuable information on it. so i’ve made sure to back up a few things, a few times. the oldest files. but not everything is backed up on DVD and in fact, nothing from the last three years. 

i did that Time Machine thing which mac has built in to the OS (mirrors your drive, backs it up on the regular), but the problem with that is i had to stop it, because my Time Machine drive ran out of room! after all, how does one HD backup three others? (counting my internal HD, i have four). it can’t. not until it is as big as all of them, and that would require a drive larger than is now on the market (not for much lonter, tho). or actually, it may be on the market, but i can’t afford it right now. 

so. my day was spent in the garage. well, the virtual garage. the garage of my anxiety. and after about ten hours of stress and freakage and restarting and reading and trying everything from clicking my heels and wishing things were different to dusting off all my computer equipment, i finally serendipitously unchecked a checkbox that—as far as i know—had been checked since i first had the drive, and suddenly things worked. go figure. i still have no idea what happened or what fixed it. very comforting, of course. as is the fact that the drive is still not working perfectly. it will work for a while, but then do odd things and just stop copying. clearly, it is preparing to die at some point soon. at least that is how i am seeing it.

anyway, for now its working. and i am about 70% done manually backing up the entire thing. i cleared a drive (about 400G), and am copying over everything valuable (excluding backed up movies and such for now, i won’t be devastated if i lose my copy of Angelheart, though I do love it so.) now, if it crashes, i don’t have to contemplate leaping from a bridge. in a sense i feel like i’ve “wasted” my weekend—which is a serious charge when your work schedule is what mine is and keeps you moving from dark to dark each day—but in fact, i haven’t. because it was insane of me to be drifting along as if having only one copy of this drive was acceptable. it was not. i’ve just been forced into doing something i should have done already. and i am “lucky” enough that it’s not too late to do so, when i thought for a day that it was. 

in light of this, i declare this week Back That OS Up Week. (OS: Operating System, por supuesto). because you don’t know, can never be sure: next week your computer might go down for the count. and if it does (which they all do eventually) you’ll wish you could go back in time to copy that one (or two or ten) super-important files that you’ve been meaning to and without which you’d be very, very, very upset. in fact, perhaps it’s already happened—this crash and loss of data—and you were down on knees begging for a chance to go back in time and your wish was granted, and here you are reading this now. you don’t remember the past, but this is your second chance! so don’t waste it, peeples. back that OS up!