A hard drive to bargain
by Andy Behrendt
I will warn you in advance that this entry is going to contain technical jargon that many readers might not understand. For those of you who like computers enough to understand it all, I'll warn you that it might make you cry. Here is a rough account of the past 48 hours:
Tuesday, 9 p.m.: My hard drive dies. During a break in the online broadcast of the Milwaukee Brewers game, I restart my 5-month-old MacBook to switch from the Windows operating system back to the standard Mac mode. My MacBook, my pride and joy since my parents gave it to me at Christmas, will not restart. I try over and over again to restart it in various ways, but it won't boot up beyond the blank "gray screen of death."
10 p.m.: The Brewers have finally won a game, but I don't care. After turning to my wife's computer and reading many MacBook-owners' accounts of a similar problems, it begins to sink in that my hard drive has died and that it has been seven months since I last backed up my data. I begin to fear that after more than 10 years of fanatically saving every photo, e-mail message, cool Web page and course paper that has crossed my various computers, I have finally become that poor sap who didn't back up his data often enough and lost a bunch of it. I pray and foolishly bargain with God that if he saves my hard drive, I'll receive the apparent message that my computer — my wife often calls it my "girlfriend" due to the amount of time I spend with it — should not be the most important thing in my world. I somehow fall asleep.
Wednesday, 3 a.m.: After hours of weird dreams, including one about a magical fairy who recreates dead hard drives, I cannot sleep any longer. I surf through various Web sites that further confirm the apparent death of my drive. I consider how my three-year warranty will replace my hard drive but not my data. I realize that virtually all my work at Luther Seminary, including a couple hundred pages of class notes and at least a few hundred photos, including those of my family's Christmas celebrations and parting shots of my wife's childhood home, are probably lost forever. After more than an hour of this torment, I struggle to go back to sleep.
8 a.m.: I keep myself busy at my new job with the Seminary Relations office. Four anxiety-filled hours of work follow.
12:30 p.m.: I arrive at the Apple Store in Roseville. A technician momentarily revives my hard drive before losing any ability to bring back the drive or its contents. I patiently wait through nearly two hours of diagnostic procedures until I give up hope. I walk back to my car, call my wife and my dad to update them and call three data-recovery companies suggested by the friendly Apple folks. The companies suggest that a complicated procedure to extract my data from the failed drive will cost between $200 and $2,500.
3 p.m.: Still in my car, I tell my wife that I am apparently out of luck. Tracy compounds my grief by sharing the news that the Brewers have lost at the hands of my favorite player, Brewers pitcher Derrick Turnbow. I start to freak out. I realize that my devastation is not as much with the loss of my precious files as my failure to back up those files amid my busy schedule. Tracy assures me this is not my fault. Amid some tears, I consider that this may indeed be a message from God that I shouldn't take so much joy in the world of computers, which is surely distracting me from the work I should be doing for God in the real world. I recall a recent conversation with my mom about how my dad, in near-poverty, used to eat a couple peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner every night in his years in seminary; I think about how lucky I am to not only have a great computer but, more importantly, to have a comfortable life with a great family and particularly a wonderful wife who feeds me like I'm a king. On the phone with my dad, I break down in admitting how ridiculous it was for me to be so concerned about my hard drive the same night that my Grandpa Don in Green Bay, my only living grandpa, is in the hospital with some thankfully minor heart concerns.
4:30 p.m.: There is some initial relief that many of my best photos and course papers and virtually all of my e-mail from the last seven months have survived, thanks largely to the miraculous technology of GMail. But when I plug in my old, external hard drive into Tracy's computer, I realize that out of some terrible fluke, that hard drive, too, has somehow lost dozens of gigabytes of data, including many files from my days as a college and professional journalist.
5 p.m.: Suddenly concerned with this new problem, I arrive at the apartment of my buddy, Jake, my only local friend with a Mac, to see if opening the external hard drive on a Mac will bring back its lost data. It doesn't. But I learn that Jake within the last week has bought a huge, external hard drive of his own and has installed the Mac operating system on it. This magnificent coincidence allows me to access my MacBook's dead hard drive and perform some further diagnostics. Jake, a true friend, sharing in my frustration, is happy to keep my MacBook overnight and let the diagnostics run their course. I drive home with some small amount of hope and call my grandpa, who is still in the hospital. He offers his regrets about my computer, and I full-heartedly assure him that I am just happy that he is doing well.
8 p.m.: After a "feel-better" meal of delicious Little Caesars pizza suggested by my dear wife, we sit down to watch the rest of "Sleeping Beauty," a favorite movie of Tracy's that we began watching two nights earlier in happier times. I realize that the manifestation of the Hard Drive Fairy was surely a result of this movie. More importantly, as we dance to the movie's music in the living room, I fully realize that even though the digital documentation of my last seven months might be gone, it is much more important that I still have my wife.
Thursday, noon: I take no small amount of solace in the empathy of my bosses and co-workers as they listen to my harrowing tale. Amid feelings that I have nothing to lose, I have developed a scheme of ideas about how I might save whatever data I can from both hard drives. My anxiety has changed into excitement about whatever little gems I might get back. My dad informs me that my Grandpa Don is leaving the hospital and is in good shape.
4:30 p.m.: I call Jake, who reports that the diagnostics on my hard drive came out better than expected. He happily agrees to install on his hard drive a file-recovery program that might somehow recover some data, despite what the Apple technicians told me. The long recovery process gets off to a promising start, and I insist that, while we wait, Tracy and I take Jake and his wife, Annie, out to dinner for being so hospitable. The four of us have a great time at Old Chicago. I stop back at Jake and Annie's place and find the recovery procedure working, slowly but surely. They invite me to stop back whenever I want on Friday to do move ahead with the file-recovery if and when it's possible. I am astounded at what awesome people they are.
Now: I realize that this blog entry has gotten way, way, way too long. I feel the need to congratulate anyone who has read the whole thing, to thank them for sharing in my adventure and to suggest that they back up their own hard drives ASAP if that is something they really care about. But I hope that they, like I, realize that there are more important things in the world. I prepare to go to bed, feeling hopeful that I might get some of my files back and assured that even if I have lost them all, I am still greatly blessed.
Amen.
Tuesday, 9 p.m.: My hard drive dies. During a break in the online broadcast of the Milwaukee Brewers game, I restart my 5-month-old MacBook to switch from the Windows operating system back to the standard Mac mode. My MacBook, my pride and joy since my parents gave it to me at Christmas, will not restart. I try over and over again to restart it in various ways, but it won't boot up beyond the blank "gray screen of death."
10 p.m.: The Brewers have finally won a game, but I don't care. After turning to my wife's computer and reading many MacBook-owners' accounts of a similar problems, it begins to sink in that my hard drive has died and that it has been seven months since I last backed up my data. I begin to fear that after more than 10 years of fanatically saving every photo, e-mail message, cool Web page and course paper that has crossed my various computers, I have finally become that poor sap who didn't back up his data often enough and lost a bunch of it. I pray and foolishly bargain with God that if he saves my hard drive, I'll receive the apparent message that my computer — my wife often calls it my "girlfriend" due to the amount of time I spend with it — should not be the most important thing in my world. I somehow fall asleep.
Wednesday, 3 a.m.: After hours of weird dreams, including one about a magical fairy who recreates dead hard drives, I cannot sleep any longer. I surf through various Web sites that further confirm the apparent death of my drive. I consider how my three-year warranty will replace my hard drive but not my data. I realize that virtually all my work at Luther Seminary, including a couple hundred pages of class notes and at least a few hundred photos, including those of my family's Christmas celebrations and parting shots of my wife's childhood home, are probably lost forever. After more than an hour of this torment, I struggle to go back to sleep.
8 a.m.: I keep myself busy at my new job with the Seminary Relations office. Four anxiety-filled hours of work follow.
12:30 p.m.: I arrive at the Apple Store in Roseville. A technician momentarily revives my hard drive before losing any ability to bring back the drive or its contents. I patiently wait through nearly two hours of diagnostic procedures until I give up hope. I walk back to my car, call my wife and my dad to update them and call three data-recovery companies suggested by the friendly Apple folks. The companies suggest that a complicated procedure to extract my data from the failed drive will cost between $200 and $2,500.
3 p.m.: Still in my car, I tell my wife that I am apparently out of luck. Tracy compounds my grief by sharing the news that the Brewers have lost at the hands of my favorite player, Brewers pitcher Derrick Turnbow. I start to freak out. I realize that my devastation is not as much with the loss of my precious files as my failure to back up those files amid my busy schedule. Tracy assures me this is not my fault. Amid some tears, I consider that this may indeed be a message from God that I shouldn't take so much joy in the world of computers, which is surely distracting me from the work I should be doing for God in the real world. I recall a recent conversation with my mom about how my dad, in near-poverty, used to eat a couple peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner every night in his years in seminary; I think about how lucky I am to not only have a great computer but, more importantly, to have a comfortable life with a great family and particularly a wonderful wife who feeds me like I'm a king. On the phone with my dad, I break down in admitting how ridiculous it was for me to be so concerned about my hard drive the same night that my Grandpa Don in Green Bay, my only living grandpa, is in the hospital with some thankfully minor heart concerns.
4:30 p.m.: There is some initial relief that many of my best photos and course papers and virtually all of my e-mail from the last seven months have survived, thanks largely to the miraculous technology of GMail. But when I plug in my old, external hard drive into Tracy's computer, I realize that out of some terrible fluke, that hard drive, too, has somehow lost dozens of gigabytes of data, including many files from my days as a college and professional journalist.
5 p.m.: Suddenly concerned with this new problem, I arrive at the apartment of my buddy, Jake, my only local friend with a Mac, to see if opening the external hard drive on a Mac will bring back its lost data. It doesn't. But I learn that Jake within the last week has bought a huge, external hard drive of his own and has installed the Mac operating system on it. This magnificent coincidence allows me to access my MacBook's dead hard drive and perform some further diagnostics. Jake, a true friend, sharing in my frustration, is happy to keep my MacBook overnight and let the diagnostics run their course. I drive home with some small amount of hope and call my grandpa, who is still in the hospital. He offers his regrets about my computer, and I full-heartedly assure him that I am just happy that he is doing well.
8 p.m.: After a "feel-better" meal of delicious Little Caesars pizza suggested by my dear wife, we sit down to watch the rest of "Sleeping Beauty," a favorite movie of Tracy's that we began watching two nights earlier in happier times. I realize that the manifestation of the Hard Drive Fairy was surely a result of this movie. More importantly, as we dance to the movie's music in the living room, I fully realize that even though the digital documentation of my last seven months might be gone, it is much more important that I still have my wife.
Thursday, noon: I take no small amount of solace in the empathy of my bosses and co-workers as they listen to my harrowing tale. Amid feelings that I have nothing to lose, I have developed a scheme of ideas about how I might save whatever data I can from both hard drives. My anxiety has changed into excitement about whatever little gems I might get back. My dad informs me that my Grandpa Don is leaving the hospital and is in good shape.
4:30 p.m.: I call Jake, who reports that the diagnostics on my hard drive came out better than expected. He happily agrees to install on his hard drive a file-recovery program that might somehow recover some data, despite what the Apple technicians told me. The long recovery process gets off to a promising start, and I insist that, while we wait, Tracy and I take Jake and his wife, Annie, out to dinner for being so hospitable. The four of us have a great time at Old Chicago. I stop back at Jake and Annie's place and find the recovery procedure working, slowly but surely. They invite me to stop back whenever I want on Friday to do move ahead with the file-recovery if and when it's possible. I am astounded at what awesome people they are.
Now: I realize that this blog entry has gotten way, way, way too long. I feel the need to congratulate anyone who has read the whole thing, to thank them for sharing in my adventure and to suggest that they back up their own hard drives ASAP if that is something they really care about. But I hope that they, like I, realize that there are more important things in the world. I prepare to go to bed, feeling hopeful that I might get some of my files back and assured that even if I have lost them all, I am still greatly blessed.
Amen.
posted by Andy Behrendt at 9:01 PM
2 Comments:
I hate to say it, but that's why i switched from a mac to a PC. No one can help you when you're down and out.
I'm going to go back up my files, i haven't done it in at least a year.
Hey Andy,
That stinks about your computer, but for some reason Scott was laughing hysterically while I was reading this blog to him. :) Good luck recovering your files. Hope to meet up with you guys sometime soon!!
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