It happened again last week. Like a horror movie, sometimes you know it's coming, the shadow of a claw reaching around the corner, a haunting melody repeated through a chorus of children's voices, Linda Blair spitting pea soup at the camera. One of my coworkers reported a blue screen on his computer last week. It was all over by the time I got to his office. The hard drive had begun to fail sometime over the weekend. I wasn't even around to back it up before it died. When I tried to restart the computer, hoping against hope that some crucial system hive file had been damaged at an inopportune moment, the worst was confirmed: error, no hard drive present. The hard drive had died.
It happens. It's happened to me more than once, and it's never pretty. System administrators - a group that technically includes me - always tell you to back up your data. I've even set up a fairly elaborate system of backups for the computers at my workplace, with shared folders written to a RAID 5 hard drive (three or more hard drives slaved together to think they're one, with one drive acting to check against the data against the others and if necessary restore or correct missing or corrupt data), backed up onto tape. Eventually, I wouldn't mind off-site backups. Point is, all these elaborate preparations still count on people dragging their data to the drive. I could automate it - and have, somewhat inconsistently - but it slows up the shutdown, not to mention the network. And the human element had not backed up his hard drive since May. He had lost work on his data sets, documents and particularly his dissertation. What's five months measured against eight years' school? Potentially a lifetime, especially when the degree is needed for a job, and the job is needed to pay off all those student loans from the previous lifetime. Still, if the loss is enormous, the cost to recoup it is appropriately capitalistic, meaning the companies that will recover your data, probably, will bleed you dry to do so. Fees go anywhere between $50 (unlikely) to $1,000 or more (how bad do you want your data?). My heart breaks when a hard drive dies. Even if the user backed up a minute before, something went down, and it's probably important.
Sometime before the turn of the millennium was my first hard drive failure. Unlike my coworker, I can almost certainly trace its death to my hands. At the time, I had a Mac clone, a Power Computing machine with something less than a gigabyte of hard disk and a processor that would be more at home in my Treo than in something attached to a monitor. How did we do it back then? The unit was a pizza box that I had set on its side to clear up desk space. One night, in an explosive fit of ire, I hit the box. Nothing happened, of course, and certainly whatever had gone wrong on screen or in system had not gone right because I was boxing the packaging. I hulked out a little, pounding the bottom of the box. Suddenly, the monitor went blank. I had killed my computer. Whatever my problem was at the time, it wouldn't bother me again. Then again... I brought out the toolbox, unscrewed the top of the machine looking for... What? A circuit breaker, now set to "off"? A tiny vial of kryptonite accidentally broken open next to a miniaturized Superman on a hamster wheel? A component sit-in?
As it turns out, that's kind of what I found, as I found the processor lying loose, popped off the motherboard. Apparently, I'd hit it in just the right direction to send it flying. I re-seated it, turned on the computer and crossed my fingers. It worked!
A few weeks later, the computer started making grinding noises. Naturally, having dealt with the innards of the machine, I ignored them until the computer would not start up. Then I called tech support. They sent out a guy who told me, nope, there's no fixing that; the delicate arm that reads the platters on your hard drive and hovers, mere atoms above it, has crashed into the platter, scratching the data it's trying to read. It's like trying to read a book by the light of the page you've just set on fire. Had anything happened to the computer recently, any sudden impact?
I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. Strictly for the warrantly, mind you, not my pride. Not my pride.
So the data was lost forever, although the fact that the technician who replaced the drive had a CD of illicitly copied programs to replace or update those consigned to binary paradise did soften the blow. I managed to recover a small portion of the data a few years later when I stumbled across a small cache of 3.5" disks I had forgotten to wipe clean. Still, it's strange when a part of your life develops amnesia, and exactly like the intersection of real life and the movies, hitting yourself on the head again will not bring it all back.
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