Bad sector

Let me preface this by saying that snarky or even well-meaning comments about Apple really will not be welcome at this time. I can't believe how often I have to say this, but seriously, guys.

I am quite stupid.

It's not like I don't know the golden rule of computers: Thou Shalt Back Up. I'm actually quite good about it, usually. My mobile devices back up daily to the cloud. My laptop backs up to an external drive I keep on my desk. It isn't wireless, so I had to remember to physically plug in my laptop for backing up, but it works.

Or it did. A few months ago, my external drive went kablooey. That's a technical term. We planned to replace it, but we were stony broke that month - like, tuna and macaroni broke.

We also knew that the house wifi router was three years old and getting twitchy. So we discussed it, and decided that we would kill two birds with one expensive stone. The Airport Time Capsule is an awesome dual-band router and a 3TB wireless backup drive. We would wait and buy one. Then all our devices would back up more easily, which meant backups would actually happen.

Yeah, you know where it's going.

We kicked the can down the road for months. We were busy. Deadlines to meet, shows to do. I had a health issue, Jim was fighting college math. Sales were okay in first quarter, but don't ask me about Christmas. Black Friday indeed. Every once in a while I'd fret, but we had the cascade of problems with Ian's computer, and the stolen iPhone (which is STILL not resolved), and I just didn't get around to it.

Even when my laptop started slowing down and acting twitchy, I thought, "I really need to upgrade the RAM so I can go to the next OS." Somewhere in there I might have remembered that I still wasn't backing up.

Last night my hard drive crashed. Repair attempts in recovery mode were unsuccessful, as was an OS reinstall. Thus another trip to the Genius Bar, and they diagnosed bad sectors on the drive. Bad enough that it won't boot or take an OS. 

It's also six years old, which qualifies as vintage, so they can't help me. There's an indie Machead shop that can install a new drive and attempt to rescue my data. Price tag is unknown at this time. This would have been a good month for the Kindles to kick off.

The money is important, but I'm simply heartsick about the data. I can reconstruct financial records and contracts from other sources, perhaps. The new book's manuscript is a tad more concerning; I am hopeful the editor who has it in hand can send it back to me. 

The photos... oh God, the photos. The Elmwood Cemetery set exists only on my laptop and Mpix.com. They're not even on the store yet; I was working on that last night. It would be disturbing if I could order the prints but did not have the images. Not to mention all the wedding photos to re-gather from our friends.

Wish me luck tomorrow, friends. Whatever luck exists for people who kick the can down the road too many times. And go back up your stuff.