What is worse: having a double hard-drive crash or having double pneumonia? If you've ever tried maintaining a web site you know that a couple of lungs filled with fluid is much easier to handle.
I should know. Last August through September I was bed-ridden for six weeks with enough anti-biotics, codeine, and muscle relaxants to choke a horse-- if it's possible to choke a horse in that fashion, which I doubt. Even though I spent most of my days passing in and out of consciousness until many parts of the flat became but a distant memory to me, I still had the laptop and a wireless connection, so despite being too weak to get a cup of tea I could still get on line and bang out the occasional column. Mind you, most of the copy read like something written in a fevered delirium-- which it was, but I could still post, and that's the whole point.
On the other hand, if the hardware suddenly decides to pack up, you're pretty much shot back into the stone age without a return ticket. That's pretty much what happened to me.
The first harbinger of doom was when my PDA suddenly died on me while I was changing the batteries. One moment it was an aging but respectable Handspring with a low-battery alert and the next it was an inert tile of plastic off to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.
No problem, I thought. I'd had that PDA since 2001 and it was due for replacement. It's all on the back up, anyway. I'll just have to rely on that until I can scrape together the dosh for a new one.
Fool that I didn't recognise an omen when I saw one.
Anyway, on the day that will forever be known as Black Friday the laptop died. I don't mean quietly sickened and passed from this world with grace and dignity. I mean that it popped its clogs. One moment it was working fine, the next it went into a restart cycle from which it never recovered and I was faced with a black screen with a blinking cursor. A call to tech support the next day ended with the bad news that my hard drive was fried and I'd need a replacement.
That was annoying, but not especially tragic. It was still under warranty, so I got the replacement for free (with an extra ten gig, which was a nice bonus) and most everything was backed up on the PC, so it just meant I was going to be a bit behind schedule. The only annoying thing was going through the back up for the web site files and making sure they were properly updated.
So, how did that go? I'm glad you asked. Does the word nightmare ring a bell? Three days after I got the PC, the oldest of Zen's components, back online as the primary and started sorting out the web files, a funny thing happened. It suddenly went into a restart cycle from which it never recovered and I was faced with a blank screen with a blinking cursor. Whatever worm, virus, or gremlin that had done for my laptop had got into the PC as well. Only this time the machine in question had been out of warranty since some time around the Battle of Omdurman. Worse, since this was the backup computer, I had, as the name implies, lost the backups. That meant not only the web files, but my e-mail files, addresses, to do lists, and a file full of images that I'd been saving for new site updates.
In the space of less than two weeks Zen's total capacity was all but wiped out.
The only ray of hope in all of this is that I am an utterly paranoid geek who looks upon fluffy kittens with deep suspicion of ulterior motives. I also have far more files than a laptop or an antiquated PC can handle, so I have an external hard drive hooked into the network for archival duties. This meant that all my audio and most of my image files were safe, but I hadn't done a full archival backup for five months, so for me it was now January 2006 all over again-- at least, it would be if I'd had a computer to access external drive, which I didn't.
So, there was nothing to do except sit back and wait for the replacement drive to show up, do the installation, and then go through all the exciting tedium of reinstalling Windows and hunting up old software disks.
At least I got a chance to catch up on my reading.
Naturally, none of this occurred during a slow news cycle. Of course not. The world started hurling material at me. Local council elections, Tory resurgence, cabinet scandals, the Iranian president's bizarre letter, Moussaoui's conviction and dodging the death penalty, The Da Vinci Code opening, the new Iraqi government, a bear running lose in Seattle at the same time another one showed up in Germany for the first time in 150 years (Coincidence? I don't think so.), Ayaan Hirsi Ali's flight from the Netherlands, and getting a chance to see the new Doctor Who episodes. It just wasn't fair. So much to rant about and no way to do so.
Worse, the backup source files for the site were gone the way of all good files. I now had to figure out some way to get the files off the server and rebuild the site in the editor-- and I couldn't even post an Ephemeral Isle column without the risk of deleting the entire site until I finished the job.
Joy unbound.
Fortunately, I found a way to avoid shutting down the column. By using Blogger I've been able to set up an alternative way of posting and I was able to go directly to ftp server to set up a redirect page (a bit like doing brain surgery through the earhole) to send people here. There's still some tweaking to be done, but at least the world can breathe a sigh that it no longer has to go on without my unsolicited ramblings.
Excelsior!
Damn! That's another thing I missed!
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