- Michael Sellers

The nexus where my personal and professional worlds come together is a place I like to call Macintosh HD. I have used the same Macbook since May 16th 2006, the day they were released. On this machine live countless quotes, proposals, hardware and software manuals, emails, keynote presentations, Excel spreadsheets, Chesapeake newsletter articles, utilities and tools, meeting notes, diagrams of customers’ infrastructure, etc. My point is, almost all of the work I have preformed in the last two and a half years of my life is stored on my beloved Macbook. But that is only the start of the used space on my hard drive. I have over 6000 songs (a thousand of them I have purchased from iTunes at about 99 cents a pop, the rest are from countless hours ripping music from my CD collection.) I have every picture of my son I have taken of him since the day he was born and the last pictures I ever took of my grandparents. I have my journal, I have the great American novel I am working on, I have a copy of the email my wife sent me ten years ago telling me she would go out on our first date. I have recipes and I have concert tickets for later this month. The value of the data on my machine can’t be measured in dollars. If it could I know there would be a lot of zeroes in it.

Two weeks ago I restarted my machine after a software update and it was at that moment my hard drive decided to fail. It wasn’t bad luck that my hard drive failed because all hard drives eventually fail. Let me repeat that, ALL HARD DRIVES EVENTUALLY FAIL! It is a mechanical device with moving parts and those parts will wear out or they will break. Most hard drives are built well and they will last several years, a few will only last minutes, the rest will die somewhere between those two extremes. Mine was a relatively new hard drive I bought at this year’s Macworld.

There I sat, with that feeling of panic and anger and the question “why me?” Why would the universe do this to me? For many people when this happens the options are bleak. If the machine is covered by Applecare Chesapeake Systems can quickly and easily replace the hard drive and reinstall the operating system onto the system. This returns the machine to a just out of the box state and all of your data is gone. Chesapeake Systems can attempt data recovery but Applecare does not cover this so the cost of that is yours to bear. My drive had an actual mechanical issue with it and it was beyond even Chesapeake’s ability to restore the data. To get the data off of my drive I would have to send it to Drive Savers in California. The price of this recovery would cost around 3 thousand dollars and it would take Drive Savers over a week to get it done. I had projects I needed to work on ASAP and a lot of those work files were encrypted, which makes recovery almost impossible.

Luckily — actually, not luckily, smartly — I use Time Machine to back up my data. I sometimes am not the most diligent person in keeping my data backed up, but Mac OS X 10.5 is. Using Time Machine and an external hard drive all of those precious files and digital keepsakes of my life live in another location. (Actually they live in two other places.) If my data is worth tens of thousands of dollars to my employers and myself, I treat it like it is worth tens of thousands of dollars. I don’t throw it into a bag or drive around with it in my car or let TSA inspectors handle it or let my child near it with a cup of apple juice. I might risk a COPY of this data being exposed to these dangers, just like I’ll risk the safety of the other two copies to the dangers they face. But between the three I know my data will live on and that’s what is important.

In the end because I have a back up solution, even as simple as Time Machine, losing a drive was simply an inconvenience that cost me a few hours and couple of hundred dollars. Without my back up solution, at best it would have been weeks lost of work and thousand of dollars. To be honest things wouldn’t have worked out for the best in this case.

So after reading this article imagine if your hard drive died right now, because it could, and for some of you reading this, it will. What will you lose? How much did that data cost you? How much would you pay to get it back? And how upset would you be if you never saw it again? Backup solutions can be cheap and simple for things that are easy to back up, or expensive and complex for data that is not so easy to back up. Chesapeake Systems is a master of all of it and we can set you up with the back up that is right for you.