The horror of a broken hard drive
Or how preparation can bash fear's face right off
Come, friend, sit yourself down. Grasp my clammy hand, we’re going on a journey together.
It’s a normal day. You’ve just woken up, a hot cup of coffee radiates in your hands. You blow the steam aside, take that first delicious sip, and prepare yourself for the day. Turning your computer on, things seem normal at first. But — what’s this? — in the place of a regular healthy whirr, you’re instead confronted with a series of guttural clicks and clacks.
You turn it off and on again. You furiously search for solutions online. You pray to whatever deity you hold dear (AKA Danny Dyer). But, try as you may, you can’t fight the irrefutable: your hard drive is dead.
Take a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s all okay. Your machine is fine. At the moment, at least.
Over the years, HDD death has been a thorn in my side. I’ve had two laptops suffer this fate and lost untold amounts of files and memories in the process.
For a while, this seemed like an inherent part of sailing the seas of digitalism, but, thankfully, these occurrences have gotten rarer. The rise of cloud services and SSDs (which are more reliable than old school hard drives) means instances of pure data devastation are now few and far between.
That doesn’t mean they don’t happen though. And, alas, this week one of my NAS HDDs was cruelly struck down.
Comrade! Don’t cry! Weep not! Neither pull out your hair nor howl at the moon nor make marionettes from the morgue and puppet their decaying limbs in order conduct a Shakespearean tragedy about my plight, it’s fine. Really, it’s fine.
I use RAID. I have two drives in this NAS enclosure, so if one fails, the data is safe on the other. While this means there’s less space overall (while I have two 6TB drives, only 6TB is actually available to use), the safety makes it worthwhile.
My precious data is secure.
It’s an interesting feeling, this, being prepared. I showed maturity. I made a sensible longterm decision that paid off.
I feel like an old fella on a porch in balmy weather, rocking back and forth, whistling a weaving song, the evening breeze caressing my cheeks while the undead fling themselves against my compound defences and pointlessly fall in droves beneath the power of my apocalypse prep work.
Rather than suffer, I have time to enjoy, to think.
They’re strange things, digital data and physical drives. These unintuitive hunks of metal and plastic contain a raft of things that are incredibly important to me, yet, if I travelled back in time, they would be useless for anything but a bludgeoning tool.
It’s why being alive at this time is so wonderful: we’re surrounded by technology that’s both magical and utterly commonplace.
There’s absolutely nothing special about plugging in an external hard drive and easily backing up every single important digital thing you own. Yet that action in itself is miraculous in a million different ways.
All I can advise is for you take advantage of it.
I don’t just use RAID on my NAS enclosures, I also have an external hard drive to ensure there’s an up-to-date backup of my laptop. At some point, it’ll pay off. I promise.
And if it doesn’t? Well, the feeling of smugness you’ll have is pretty good too.
What do you think about cloud storage?