Tag Archives: backup

Failure and recovery…

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I was raised in the age of the personal computer. Not long after the first Apple Macintosh ended up in my elementary school’s “computer lab,” one landed on our desk at home. Still, though, I don’t necessarily consider myself a “digital native.” For the most part, my computers have always simply been productivity tools that more or less live on my desk. I don’t generally ask them to do anything extraordinary or heroic – a bit of word processing, web browsing, and video streaming. 

I also have a bit of a habit of keeping my computers just a bit too long. Unlike my phone, as long as the computer is puttering along, I’m mostly satisfied to let it keep going even at a slowed pace. In 30+ years of computer ownership, that’s always been good enough.

Good enough always is right up to the point where it isn’t… which is apparently the point I reached with my 10-year-old iMac last Thursday afternoon. Sometime between when I signed out of work for the day at 4:00 and when I sat down and tried to stream an episode of Game of Thrones while I had dinner at 5:00 (don’t judge me), I suffered what I’ve taken to calling a “catastrophic hard drive failure.” 

If you haven’t lost a hard drive unexpectedly, I don’t recommend it. I’ve spent the last three days slowly putting my electronic life back together. Needing to unexpectedly buy a new computer, of course, just adds insult to injury.

For the last five or six years, I’ve been paying a nominal monthly fee to have my computer backed up “in the cloud.” That has honestly been the saving grace of this experience once I remembered that I actually hadn’t lost decades of photos, writing, finances, and every other kind of file and record you can imagine. Once I got past the initial terror at the possibility of losing everything, getting it all back was just a matter of following all the steps – and downloading a lot of software. 

I’m not absolutely thrilled with my new 24-inch iMac. Stepping down from the 27-inch model feels, in some ways, like a downgrade. It’s a fine machine and I still like the all-in-one form factor, but I’m really missing the extra screen real estate. I won’t rule out needing to add a second monitor at some point to compensate for that. For now, I’m trying to be satisfied with having brough things back to life in fairly short order and without too much trouble. 

For my next trick, I’ll be ordering a new external hard drive so I can start keeping an onsite back up of everything. For most situations that should be more convenient and really cut down the amount of time it takes to recover… but you can bet I’ll keep paying that monthly fee for online backup. It proved to be some of the best money I’ve ever spent on a subscription. 

Faith in the cloud…

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Storing data “in the cloud” is not exactly new. It’s the modern version of mainframes with dumb terminals repackaged to sound somehow more futuristic. For data intensive activities – lets say storing a master backup of my hard drive – having it reside in the cloud (i.e. renting space in someone else’s server farm) works well enough for most purposes.  It just hums along in the background making a faithful copy of everything I have stored on my home computer. The chances of that service and my computer both crapping out at the exact same time are remote enough to not cause a moment’s active worry.

With something like a password manager, though, you end up with a bit of a different story. For five hours today Lastpass, one of a handful of large and popular password managers, was offline. It’s probably not a crisis if you use relatively simple passwords, like 1-2-3-4-A-B-C-D. If you use this kind of service to manage a hundred or more passwords and each of those passwords is a unique 16+ character string, however, life is going to get inconvenient in a hurry if there happen to be sites you actively need to log in to on a daily basis. 

For five hours today Lastpass failed me and I was effectively locked out of sites I use regularly, but that require a daily log in. Some passwords I had to reset manually (while taking note of the new password to sync later with the application that’s nominally in charge of managing my passwords). Others I was locked out of completely while waiting for the systems people to bring their website back online.

No online service will ever have a 100% availability. That goes with the territory. As a paying customer, though, I do expect some basic communication from the company about what’s happening and what is being done to restore services, and more specifically an ETA on when we can expect the repair to be completed. Today, unless you went digging on Twitter, it was a resounding silence from Lastpass. Not an impressive bit of performance… and something that’s got me reevaluating the balance between the security of a paid professional management site versus just keeping everything on a damned spreadsheet so I can use it when I need it. 

Dark and quiet…

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Last night I learned that my little corner of the world is incredibly dark and quiet when the magic of electricity fails in the middle of the night. We’re talking can’t see you hand in front of your face kind of dark… and wake you up out of a dead sleep because you’re not hearing all the running HVAC equipment and other background noises that electricity brings kind of quiet.

It was downright eerie… for about 40 seconds until one by one I could hear the neighbors backup generators springing to life to power life as normal in the 21st century. The power here only stayed out for about ten minutes, but it’s safe to say I now have one more home improvement on the list – if only because I’d be hugely ill tempered to find myself the lone person in the neighborhood sitting in the dark during a longer term outage.

Now if I can just count on nature to play nicely until after next tax season, that would be fantastic because I’m fairly sure the kind of genset I want isn’t going to be one funded out of petty cash. After that, dark and quiet will be someone else’s problem. I mean, sure, you can live without the modern conveniences, but why the hell would you want to?

Tuning in…

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photo (10)A few days ago, I went digging thought iTunes for a few songs that I hadn’t heard in a while. After years of being transferred from computer to computer, to external hard drives, and being tweaked, curated, and edited to the extreme, it seems that iTunes has been slowly leaking. Some of my favorite albums, carefully imported from CD seven or eight years ago before all my shiny plastic disks went to live in a couple of large cardboard boxes, were nowhere to be seen. Some had just one or two songs. I’m guessing that I “lost” half my music collection before I really started to notice it… as much a fan as I am of going all electronic, I’m suddenly glad that I didn’t sell those disks off for a buck or two a piece years ago.

So now, while I had planned on spending a good part of the day getting mt tax stuff together, I’m most likely going to be sitting here swapping out disks every two minutes until balance is restored. It’s ok. Once it’s done, the music will end up being saved as part of my ridiculously over complicated double redundant back up scheme. Then again, if I don’t have to do this again in seven years, it’s probably worth the effort.

What are we doing here?

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Once every few months I catch a wild hare and start obsessively backing up everything on my work computer. At last count, I’m working on saving 2GB of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents for posterity. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood if 1500 individual files generated over the last eight months. By most standards it’s not a particularly obscene amount of storage or an abnormally large number of files. As I’m sitting here watching the “% complete” bar click higher, I’m struck with the fact that although I’m relentlessly backing this stuff up, keeping a copy for myself, and sending a copy into deep storage, I’m probably the only person on the planet who will ever actually see any of this stuff again. In a post-atomic or -biological apocalypse world, it seems unlikely that any of the survivors are going to be particularly interested in whatever brilliant PowerPoint slides I’ve managed to come up with.

All of that begs the question, what the hell are we really doing here? I think we all have some conception that we’re “adding value” somehow by performing whatever task has been set for us. We like to think that what we’re doing is good and important work; that someone, somewhere will be better off because we sat behind our monitors and smashed our fingers repeatedly against the keyboard. Since I don’t have a little laminated card telling me where to go and what to do when the warheads start landing, I think it’s safe to assume that whatever I’m doing isn’t all that critical to the preservation of civilization as we know it. Apparently I’m not a national treasure. That realization stings a little.

Look, I’m not saying I want to give up the pay and bennies and head off into the woods to start a commune or anything. I don’t think the situation is all that hopeless. Still, it’s a smack in the head about priorities and deciding what’s important and what doesn’t mean a damned thing. In the course of a career and a life, I’ve made some good decisions and some bad ones. If this serves as nothing more than a gentle smack in the back of the head reminding me to make better decisions in the future, well, then the day has been more productive than most.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.