So…yesterday my hard drive started making this…let’s call it “unusual”….sound as I was working. (It was sort of like a mocking cackle.)
Being somewhat Mac savvy and certainly thoroughly experienced on my Powerbook G4, I took matters into my own hands. I did a hard re-boot and waited for that happy Apple to appear.
Nothing. More mocking cackle. Black screen of death.
I then threw the matter to our IT guys, who informed me that there was nothing we could do. Well, almost nothing. We did try freezing the hard drive for a few hours to see if that would bring it back to life, but to no avail.
The long and the short of it is that I lost 6 months of my digital life. (Yes…I know…no backups. Very stupid.) Six months. All of my writings. All of my learnings. All of my work.
Then I realized something - I wasn’t really all that upset.
I’ve lost data before and been VERY upset. EXTREMELY upset. Not so this time. Hmm…
In fact, there was something freeing about this whole thing. I’ve been on a simplicity kick lately and one of the primary targets of my efforts was to be my now deceased Powerbook. Looks like that’s all been taken care of for me.
I’m still in the middle of this whole ordeal. Every six minutes I’ll suddenly realize something else that I’ve lost and it’ll sting for a minute or two. But for the most part, I feel really good. It’s made me realize how much of my life is on that stupid machine. It’s made me realize how dependent I am on technology to get by. It’s made me realize that complete dependability on any kind of machine is foolish.
Most of all, though, it’s made me realize that what I thought was so important and critical to me wasn’t really, and that’s a good feeling.
So…quick poll for all of us:
In this interview, 
December 4th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Well I back up a little. But on a whole I would get over it since I realized long ago, just like paperwork and file cabinets, nearly 90% of it never sees the light of day again once you have finished that particular project. It can all be recreated if need be. I figure it will be a better recreation since I have become a better designer.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
I used to work tech support for Apple….try pulling the hard drive out of the PBG4…purchase an empty external hard drive casing with fire wire ports on it, install the hard drive you removed into the external case, and plug it in. It should show up on the desktop if the issue is the logic board. If this doesn’t work, go to http://www.powerpage.org. The guy who runs that site does data recovery on the side and at a good price. Hope this helps.
-D
December 7th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Thanks. Yeah…I’ve tried it in a firewire case. The problem is the drive…unfortunately. Thanks for the recommendation on data recovery, though.