Backup, backup, backup
One of the things that I really emphasize, particularly in my digital photography classes, is the absolute, critical importance of backing up your files. Hard drive failure is a matter of when, not if. I recently purchased external hard drives for both my work and home computers for this explicit purpose. As a matter of fact, my new 400 gigabyte drive was still sitting in its shrink-wrapped box (where it had been for three weeks) when my computer suffered a major crash on Monday.
YEAARRRRGH!!!
In my own defense, I had been regularly backing up the photographs on the computer onto DVDs, so I would have been able to recover those particularly precious files. Still, things did not look good. This led me to call Apple Technical Support.
Recommendation number one: If you are a Mac owner and an educator, purchase the Applecare program. The educator discount is really good, and the online support is great.
The helpful people on the phone helped me diagnose that my iMac was suffering from what is colorfully known as a “kernel panic.” Unfortunately, even when I followed their instructions and booted from the appropriate CD, the hard drive was not repairable. (It identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.8 million problems. I am not making this up.) At this point, they told me that I needed to purchase a third-party program called DiskWarrior. According to the folks I spoke with on the phone, the software is so good that virtually the entire tech support team owns copies.
A quick trip to CompUSA and $99 later, I was booting from the DiskWarrior CD. Thirty minutes after that, my computer was alive and kicking and all of the rather serious damage to my directories was repaired. And yes, I immediately backed up the whole darn hard drive!
Recommendation #2: If you own a Mac, buy this software.
And I really don’t need to say the final recommendation, but - backup, backup, backup. This is not the first time I have had a hard drive problem. Luckily, I was able to rescue my data this time, but I have had hard drives mechanically break down, with no ability to recover files. Luckily, in those cases I did have up-to-date backups. I know people who have lost terribly important materials because they hadn’t made copies, and it’s a dreadful feeling knowing that a few minutes of effort could have protected against the loss. To paraphrase Harriet Beecher Stowe,
The bitterest tears shed over any computer are over drives left uncopied and files left unrecovered.