heeding a warning

My heart skipped a beat for a second or two, I thought, when my external backup hard drive didn’t register on my computer after plugging it in; normally it was just easily detected, and a blue icon appeared shortly on Explorer to indicate the Western Digital Passport was ready. (I felt as if I had seen the dreaded B.S.O.D. or the Blue-Screen-Of-Death when all you can see on your computer screen is gibberish, meaning your PC experienced a fatal error and was rendered unresponsive.) I made two or three additional attempts—my panic level rising steadily at the same time—and yet no signs of hardware registration came out. I then headed over to Rom’s machine and plugged the drive there instead, and also used a different USB cable hoping it would make the difference. It still didn’t register at first but the last tweaks on the cable finally made it work. All the backup data was intact.

My body went limp afterwards, but I felt relieved at the thought that it was just a false alarm. I didn’t disconnect it immediately though, or replaced the cable with the original one that came in the box, superstitiously thinking that a slight touch could do something harmful. I found the resolve moments later and tried re-connecting it on my own machine. And it worked, the hard drive connected.

I still couldn’t figure out what could’ve caused it: maybe it was the original cable, a loose connection at the ports, or somehow not using the drive for a month made it “cold”. I really don’t know. But it was one of those unpleasant incidents that caught me unawares, and it was a situation I really hated being in. But actually, I hated myself more for my laxity since I removed some of those “original” files (especially map data and photos that I’ve amassed for several years) on my computer for lack of space and kept the sole backup of those files only on that hard drive, which consequently became the sole copy.

This recent false alarm turned out to be a reminder of a similar incident, only that time was a fatal one because my computer hard drive crashed, wiping out all the data I had produced with it. And I did not have any form of backup at the time even in the days of CD-RWs. I had to reconstruct all my data from scratch, no small and easy feat. That was back in 2002. I vowed to never let it happen to me again. And seven years later I still count myself fortunate not to have experienced a repeat performance.

So for the past several hours now, arduous and inefficient as the task may be, I’ve been diligently backing up my data. A redundant copy of my most important files is slowly being duplicated safely in another backup drive, a necessary step to ensure that this next lease at life, so to speak, is not wasted; or else face the consequence of potentially losing more compared to what I had lost years ago.

Any ideas out there on making seamless and more efficient backups? I’m not doing backups on rewritable DVDs or even CDs anymore, but I still make redundant copies of important files on external drives and keep the originals on my computer drive. What makes the process inefficient is that I either copy over the backup folders, or delete the backup and then copy the updated version on the external drive. That way I can still access the backup files from another computer, in cases when I don’t bring my own machine.

Lately, thoughts of getting a MacBook are also becoming very appealing, having heard of Time Machines and synchronized backup files. Besides, open source softwares for handling the mapping work that I do are now more powerful and friendlier to above-average mortals compared to how they were nine years ago, which makes switching to a Mac environment more possible.