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HOUSEKEEPING AT THE WASHINGTON NOTE
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Wednesday, Feb 02 2005, 12:29PM
As regular readers of The Washington Note know, I have been fairly stunned by the growth in readership of this blog, and I work hard to interact with those who comment -- both in private emails and in the public comments sections.
I am also launching a suite of foreign policy and international economic policy projects at the New America Foundation in collaboration with some other organizations.
And I have had some writing commitments to manage -- some of which have gone well and the others on the edge of being wrapped up (or were).
All of this was manageable until my hard disk crashed the other day forcing me to spend several days at computer firms trying to extract items trapped in my machine. Unfortunately, "everything" seems to be irretrievable.
When my computer began making "whirrrrring" noises as I was pounding out the final words about 'pugnacious nationalism' and the religiously inspired President we have (reviewing Anatol Lieven's book), a blue screen appeared stating "PHYSICAL MEMORY DUMP IN PROCESS." Nothing on it worked after that. I had been unplugged, and I chuckled to myself that George Bush's God might be better than my own -- since I had just been screwed by fate.
Can you say back-up? Well, I can say it now -- but never did before.
So, I have lost email addresses, schedules, email, draft articles, speech drafts and notes, photos, everything one would save on a laptop that held 'it all.'
This has slowed me down -- and I am rebuilding lists, etc. One of the things on which I have been slow is sending out receipts for those who sent in donations to the Walter Reed Society. I am getting them done -- but have had to do some retrieval of lists on this that were a bit more time consuming than expected.
I also lost two articles that were finished and just being edited in final form -- and I had decided not to send them until done. Now, I need to rewrite at least one of them as the deadline has passed on the other.
So, these are my problems -- but for those of you who wonder why I might not have been as responsive as usual to emails sent, now you know the rest of the story.
My issues are minor compared to real world tragedies that some in this world are dealing with -- so I am still smiling about all of this. But to others expecting a note back, hang in there while I reorder and reorganize my digital life.
And yes, I will back-up everything from now on. More later.
-- Steve Clemons
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Dear Steve: HOW HORRIBLE!!! I know it doesn't help much but several of my friends have done the same, and they have all survived their failure to back up data and have bounced back well. Thanks for continuing to write and think through this mess, as it seems you have these last several days.
d.
Doug -- Thanks. I will try a Mac next round. I'm on a Dell Inspiron laptop now -- and it's pretty new and have insurance on all the hardware -- but it's the stuff inside that mattered. But I think I will try to get back into the Mac world next time around. I defected in the early 90s when compatibility problems abounded throughout.
best,
Steve
If the data you lost is worth money to you, OnTrack data recovery (http://www.ontrack.com) can probably get it back. Prices range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand depending on what is necessary, and you will probably have to physically ship the drive to them.
They helped my friend recover her thesis after her Macintosh trashed it. :)
Steve,
Bummer!
I second that emotion from Doug ... get a MAC and a big firewire external disk. With OS X you are in reallly good hands. Good luck with the hassles.
Actually, OnTrack has competitors out there.
In any event, condolences and best of luck in recovering. This fan waits patiently.
I have a Windows machine and after a couple times of having experienced the same slow and infuriating realization all my data has been lost, my back-up strategy is this: I have a second hard drive for important stuff. Formatting the first hard drive doesn't erase the second. For absolutely guaranteed backup, burning cd- or dvd- ROMS and then writing the date on them has worked very well for me.
Nothing is immune...dell seems to be particularly susceptible to hard drive problems, and a friend with a mac had his hard drive fail after a bit more than a year (just after warranty ran out). He bullied them into replacing it under the warranty, but still lost some of his data. Backup, backup, backup...
I don't think getting a Mac (which I highly recommend) will help with the hard drive problems. It's all just hardware, unfortunately. I finally bought a DVD writer after the second time I lost everything. In addition to OnTrack (which I didn't know about), I've heard of DriveSavers which does something similar. But it'll cost a lot. You ship the drive to them, and they open the thing up in a clean room and work from there.
Oh, Steve, we have all been in there in one form or another. You have my sympathy.
Right now my 'old' computer won't recognize either my DVD or my CD writer, so, even though I have everything backed up on my second slave hard drive, I can't access it to burn a CD. My entire genealogy project is on that hard drive -- with three backups, none of which I can copy.
Best of luck and hang in there, man.
I hope we will not miss your thoughts on Anatol Lieven.
Surely you know enough to have a Mac?
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