It’s Nice When Things Work

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but, sometimes, a sound can be worth a whole movie.

Late Thursday night I was working on my laptop in our home office when the desktop computer (that serves as our local server) on the table next to me began to make a series of repetitive whining clicks.

That whining click was worth a movie – a scary movie (hello, Halloween!): the ONLY thing that would have caused that sound, given that it was idling along with no one working on it, was the C: drive having a terminal stroke.

The scary movie was, of course, being the failure of the boot drive on the computer with all the applications that only that computer has, and all the endless hassle in getting it fixed and reconstituted… and needing to use it on Friday.

So, I reached over, pushed the power button and it instantly powered off (also not a good sign).  I sighed and decided to procrastinate the autopsy until Friday morning.

Friday morning, after a meeting and some other work, I tried to start it up and was readily able to confirm that the C: drive was toast.  So I popped the side cover and pulled it out, as well as its equally elderly D: drive (though for the life of me I couldn’t remember what was on it) and cleaned it up (not too much dust in there – I do maintenance on my electronics…).

I looked in my work closet and, voila!, had a brand-new-never-out-of-the-anti-static-bag 320GB Western Digital HD.  I could only vaguely recall why I had it (it was the same older style that was in the server), but, hey, who’s going to complain when the replacement hardware is there in your hands?

Plunking it into the server was easy, then the potentially scary movie activity came next: getting all the operating system, applications and data back on and running.

Over the years I have learned the hard way how to back up data (don’t ask, and I won’t start crying).  I back up to an external HD the entire C: drive each evening using a program called Acronis, (which I highly recommend) as well as all valuable applications/files online using Mozy.  On top of that (phew!), I also use a file synchronizing service called SugarSync that (essentially) real-time syncs critical folders (many GB of stuff) between the server (a PC) and my laptop (a Mac).

It all worked perfectly.

I put the Acronis boot CD into the server, turned it on, it booted up, the Acronis app started, I pointed the back up files to the new C: drive, told it to start and (here’s the only draw back) 5 hours later…. the server was 100% back in service, with everything current.

It’s nice when things work the way they are supposed to.