Day 366, Year 6: Computer Up-date
Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny, Temps in the Upper 50’s
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
I was on the 8 am bus going into Falmouth this morning to buy a new external hard drive. Two of ours have failed recently, one that I had used almost daily for the past six years and one that I bought in North Carolina only four months ago. The life of this method of storing data is supposed to be four to five years, so we weren’t surprised that my one went. But the new one was a complete surprise. Yesterday the computer shop called and said that they could recover the data on the old drive but that I needed to bring a new one in for them to copy on. Thus, my early morning trip to town. I bought the drive and took the bus back to the computer shop. To my delight and surprise, I found out that my old IBM ThinkPad computer looks like it is up and running again. I can pick that up tomorrow and see how long it lasts. But the really devastating news was the newest external hard drive is really, really gone. They have me a brochure for contacting Drive Savers Data Recovery, but that is just too expensive. So I will have to rebuild and rewrite what I have lost. But what I did find out was that the old WD drive that they were able to recover data from is built totally differently than the newer ones. The old ones can be broken into and the hard drive taken out to be worked with. The new ones have no internal access, so when something goes wrong there is no way of fixing it. In addition, the older drives have rubber gaskets to protect them from movement, but the new ones do not. So the least little jar and your data can be gone. Sure wish I had known this bit of information years ago. I guess we have just been lucky until now, but we will certainly be more careful in our future choices. The computer shop isn’t certain, but they think they also have Mark’s old Sony Vaio running. I’ll go back in tomorrow and see for sure what runs and what doesn’t.
It was a beautiful day and I picked Sam and Jonah up from school and brought them here to Windbird for the afternoon. Both kids have a cold, again, but the sun was so bright and warm that we choose to do an art activity outside on the dock in the sunshine and then read a book there before we came inside for a nap. We have to find every excuse we can to soak in that warm sunshine before the weather turns cold. It is going to be cooler at night over the next few days and it is supposed to rain. So it looks like our sunshine will be going away.
