Making the case for backing up your photos...

So it's been over a month since I posted. And I was doing so well! I do have a partial explanation, though...

Just after my last post, we came home to a dead iMac. The hard drive died without warning. I took it into the Apple store to make sure, and it wouldn't even show up on their diagnostic machine. So we lost everything that was on the computer. This could have been a total tragedy, but luckily after the girls were born I started backing up our photos and videos compulsively. I was more concerned at the time about losing our computer to earthquake or fire or robbery, but that meant I was prepared for catastrophic hard drive failure, too.

Here Meredith is helping me perform brain surgery on the iMac. With some encouraging from our IT guy at work I was able to replace the hard drive myself. He showed me a YouTube video of someone taking the thing apart and I was able to replicate the process. I upgraded my hard drive to 2 TB from 500 GB, so now I have even more space to store stuff that can disappear at the blink of an eye.

How could this happen, you ask? From what I read online, hard drives sometimes show signs of being ready to crap out. Things might take longer to load, or the computer may freeze with increasing frequency. Not ours. We had no warning at all. The hard drive in my computer was not even 4 years old. Apparently the expected lifespan of a hard drive is 3-5 years, though many last much longer. We do have an idea of what happened, though, because just a few days after the death of the hard drive we woke up to a burning surge protector and flickering lights.

After the power company determined that it wasn't a problem with the grid, they sent a truck to the house. When the technician checked the line between our house and the pole, it was almost completely eaten through with age. It was probably 50 years old. This was causing voltage fluctuations in our house, which likely killed my computer. Even though it was plugged into a surge protector, the fluctuations weren't high enough to trip it, but were enough to mess with the delicate electronics that control the hard drive.

Here's the new brand new line they replaced the old one with. So now I don't have to worry about my new hard drive dying for that reason, anyway.

 Even though I have everything important backed up, it is taking forever to reload all that stuff back onto the new hard drive, but I am getting there. I hope you learn from my bad luck and back up the things you would hate to lose!