Mad Money Machine

Computer Rescued, Now What?

My plan worked. On show 140 I told you about my crashed computer. When we left for a Christmas vacation for a week, I shut off my computer. It had been having some boot up problems before. Those problems turned out to be an early warning signal for something more major. I should have listened. Instead, I did what my gut told me not to do and that was to turn off the computer for the whole week. Yeah, save ten cents of electricity. But come back home to a non-functional computer.

This has happened to me before. One of my old Gateway machines a few years back suffered “stiction.” The basic idea is that the hard drive spins so long and gets warm, that when it cools down the head sticks to the platter when you try to turn on the computer. Sometimes a sharp slap will actually fix it. It did not fix the Gateway and I lost data.

So I learned a lesson: have a duplicate copy of the data. A backup. I ordered my Dell with a mirrored hard drive. Two identically sized disks with one simply copying the other. If one fails, take it out and boot off the other one. I also have an external hard drive in the event that the whole hard drive controller fails. 

In this case, something else failed. The computer didn’t even try to come on. Hit the power button and after the fan ran for one second, it shut off again. Very frustrating. But not to panic because I have the data in three places, right?

Yeah, but try to get at that data. See, my other computer is a Mac, remember, so hooking up the external hard drive to it won’t restore the applications that are necessary to get at the data. Yeah I could run Parallels and run Windows on the Mac (which I plan to do someday). Or take the comptuter to Geek Squad and have them fix it (while copying out my personal data? I think not.) Best solution I came up with is to buy an identical computer from eBay for less than $400 bucks and swap hard drives. Five days later, Fedex shows up with the box.

Guess what? It worked! I’m typing on the new computer with my old hard drives right now.

Still, I’m leery of having to do this each time. I want a living backup solution where all my data is immediately accessible, including the applications needed to get to the data. Like Google Mail and other cloud applications.

One solution I’ll be looking at is the upcoming HP MediaSmart home servers. They appear to be moderately-priced computers that you put on your home network and use as backup servers. They even say you can put your iTunes music there. I wonder if that is slow over the network though. I’ve considered Drobo and online backup websites too. I’ll let you know what I decide…

In the meantime, I think Hallmark should create a line of sympathy cards for those who lose their hard drives.