Friday, May 2

Semi-Bummed

Got my MacBookPro back from Apple repair today. Yeah, it was yet another Seagate drive that crashed destroying all data upon it. When I bought the first machine the Seagate drive was 120 G, the second time that drive was replaced after spectacular crashes Apple gave me a new MacBookPro with 150G hard drive. That's the one that crashed this week and the replacement drive is NOT a Seagate!!! It is a 200G Hitachi (Yea!). The new 200G drives are no longer maed by Seagate. Looking at the results when I Google (Seagate +MacBook Pro +malfunction) well the evidence is grim. The Seagate drive seems to have a design fault.

But even so, I must be the unluckiest user in the world having three of those things crash on me since last October. Of course I lost all of my data including two graphic files that you can see here... one of the Pigeon Point lighthouse and the other of the way-cool Muscle Worker. Sigh... These jpgs are all that remain. I work in a very large space at 270dpi. It is not unusual when a finished file approaches a gig in size. I do that so I can eventually have the option of printing the image VERY LARGE. That will never happen now with those files. No way I will try to recreate them. Sigh.

Apple has been very supportive during all of these problems. Their repairs have taken two or three days at most (except for the new machine they swapped me for the old one... that had to come from China and took about a week). The biggest problem is in rebuilding all of the data. I hope I can do it over the course of this weekend.

So, while I am less bummed now that I have the machine back with a new and larger drive, I remain semi-bummed by the work I have to do, the data I lost, and the fact that I cannot really ever trust this machine again.

Your thoughts?

3 comments:

Stacey Olson said...

you are beginning to make me glad that I use windows.. (grin) so sorry about your pc troubles.. that is probably one of the most frustrating things I can think of..

Andreas said...

Oh Goodness, you know, I've been trying to catch up on my blog for more than a week, because I've experienced a hard drive crash and had then to re-install everything on a new computer. I know how you feel.

Basically there is only one way around it, and that's regular backups on an external hard drive. If you can, use that drive to carry your data to another computer in another place. I happen to work in Vienna and be in Carinthia on weekends, thus I have two computers. Even I don't do my backups daily, but I automatically do it twice a week when traveling. Thus I can lose at most the work of five days. Honestly, I could handle that.

CDs are useless as backup media today, my experiences with DVDs are bad and I never would trust them my data. BluRay, well, so far I don't even think about supporting a technology that's primarily designed against and not for its users. Online backups are still out of the question for anyone doing photography. In good weeks I travel with 10GB of new images.

Basically that leaves no alternative to hard drives. You only have to make sure that it's more than one, better more than two. Hey, the 4TB hard drives are coming next year :)

Debra Trean said...

I read this to my husband this am...he says....get a back up hard-drive....cheap insurance....perhaps.... I am a huge mac person too so I do hear ya understand ya and feel for ya.