This is why we backup.

I bought a 2TB external drive about a month ago to replace my collection of aging drives. Between Heathen City, some archival videos, and a photo library nearing 100GB (not to mention about as much in music and porn respectively) it filled up right quick, and it was nice to clear some more space on the internal drive on my iMac, which incidentally just turned two.

 

I bought it when my MacBook Pro melted, right in the middle of production of Heathen City 2. Fortunately, since I store all my active projects in Dropbox it was a matter of dusting off my older black MacBook (aka The Blackintosh) and a half-hour's downloading, and I was back on track.

 

I'd noticed that the drive would occasionally fail to reactivate after my iMac woke up from Sleep, which was remedied by unplugging and replugging the USB cable. Annoying, but hardly a deal-breaker considering how cheap the drive was. And then last week it simply didn't start up under any circumstances. No light, no power-on whirr.

 

I brought my new external drive back to the shop. As soon as I mentioned the product, the helpful chick behind the counter immediately began filling out forms on her workstation, correctly predicting the model (a Samsung G3 piece of shit) since so, so many had been returned. She recommended against getting a replacement, instead giving store credit for another model.

 

So what about all my precious data? My video and HC archives? The Bad Dog Books production files? A decade's worth of photos? All my precious porn?

 

No sweat.

 

I am so, so fastidious about backups. Earlier this year I bought a subscription to Crashplan, which is simply awesome. For fifty bucks a year you get unlimited cloud storage for one machine and boy howdy, do I make use of it. Crashplan sits in the background and quietly uploads the folders you specify to the cloud, keeping track of any changes and uploading only those bits of data that have changed.

 

So for the next two weeks my iMac will be hogging all the neighborhood bandwidth to retrieve basically everything. It's a bit of an inconvenience, but it's so, so worth it.

 

Are your backups up to date?

 

- A.