Of the three hard disk drives I have sitting around running at any one time, the one I’m most worried about dying is the one that holds my photo archive.
We had a thunderstorm last week that caused a power outage at the house. Everything came back up just fine, except for the drive that holds my photo archive (natch). I was absolutely flipping out, but quietly, and in such a way that Leah wouldn’t start flipping out too. I have a CD backup of all my photos from 2002 to July 2005, but I would’ve still been missing all of last Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, our 2005 trip to Grand Marais…lots of great stuff.
Fortunately, Kevin was in town this past weekend, so I was able to bounce some ideas off him. By the time he left on Sunday, I’d pretty much resigned myself to shelling out $100 for data recovery software to see if I could pull anything off of what I thought at the time was a flaky drive. Before I got out my debit card, though, I took apart the enclosure that housed the troublesome drive and moved the drive to a different enclosure. After powering up the drive, there were my missing files! I hurried in to tell Leah, who was on the phone with a friend, and she was so excited she gave me a high five. While I was excited too, I told her there would be no more high fiving in our house. Ever.
So it looks like I have an enclosure with a bad FireWire port on it. I’ve contacted the company I bought it from to see whether they’ll honor their 1-year warranty. In the meantime, I think I’ll see if I can get the enclosure to work using the USB2.0 interface. Needless to say, the second I got the drive running, I created a tar.gz archive of my albums folder. Alas, it comes to something like 4.46GB, which is about .1 GB or so over the capacity of a blank DVD-R disc. I’ll have to create a couple smaller archives and back them up separately.