Journal Entry
Man without a laptop
I am a man without a laptop. I have my Mac Pro, and I can write on that, but I’m a restless writer (you would be too on 14 hour days) and like to split my time between the comfy chair in the corner of my office, the living room, the sunroom, the picnic table, and the coffee shop up town.
The genius bar confirmed ’severe mechanical failure’ and the local genius looked at me and said ‘you weren’t going to ask us to try and recover data, right?’ in that tone of voice that was between someone he recognized as a fellow computer geek (I walked up after a long 1.2 hour wait and said “the hard drive ate it, I’ve blah blah geek disk recovery fancy magic and it failed”) that meant ‘don’t bother trying to pay for the recover, your disc platter has been dinged up more than a New York cab on New Year’s Eve.’
They’re repairing it, no cost to me. But it’ll be away for 3-5 days. Sad. And I have to rewrite 1,000 words I already wrote last night. Also sad. But it could have been worse. I once lost *everything* in a data crash.
Oddly enough, I’m most put out about the fact that I’d spent a lunch break designing a really nifty excel spreadsheet tracking wordcounts, and also creating estimated time of novel completion based on a 5 day moving average wordcount. With charts! Because I’m a geek!
The Apple Genius Bar folk were really nice, I waited a loooong time to get to the bar and hadn’t had dinner, so I was pretty tuckered. I got there at 8pm, and stood in place for almost 50 minutes. Not their fault, the place was packed with iPhone people and it was clearly a rush time for them, and they were getting people who were very new to Apples and had lots of beginning questions. The store was officially closing as they took a look at my laptop and sold me my Time Capsule.
And that was my very long evening.
Now, off to find caffeine and start rewriting those words, plus many more.
Filed under the topic Journal on July 15th 2008 at 11:47 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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Tobias is a Caribbean-born SF/F novelist who lives in Ohio.
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1. Rob in Denver on Jul 16th, 2008 at 12:04 am
If you don’t feel like recreating that Excel spreadsheet, I’ve got one I can send you. Does what you describe… except it’s on a rolling seven days… and it doesn’t have the fancy charts.
Still, I can hook you up.
2. Adam Christopher on Jul 16th, 2008 at 3:45 am
Heya Rob – at the risk of starting an avalanche and crashing the interweb, I’d love to see your spreadsheet. Sounds useful!
You can drop me a line from my blog.
3. Stephen Leigh on Jul 16th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Oh, ugh! My condolences…
It won’t help in an emergency, but if in the future you want to see a Genius and not wait hours, you can set up appointments in advance. I assume you hit the Easton store in Columbus. If you go to http://www.apple.com/retail/easton/ you can set up an appointment by clicking the “Reserve” link under the Genius Bar logo…
I need to get a Time Capsule myself…
4. Lynn on Jul 16th, 2008 at 8:11 am
“But it could have been worse. I once lost *everything* in a data crash.”
My worst meltdown came from a power company spike that torched eight years of files and left me with three towers that were usable only as doortstops. I’d only backed up open files and lost the backups for everything else during a transcontinental move, so things were pretty desperate there for a while. Eventually I did get my data recovered by a company that specializes in that sort of thing (getting it off drives that have been in fires, at the bottom of the ocean, etc.) but it was very expensive. I think they still have my partially melted drive on display at the recovery place.
5. Tobias Buckell on Jul 16th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Stephen: I did reserve an appt., they were just slammed.
Lynn: ouch! I looked into one of those data recovery places after my first horrible crash, but the price was so high and I was just an amateur at the time so I figured it was just a sign that I needed to keep writing more and back up LOL.
6. Kate Elliott on Jul 16th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I was at the Genius Bar (taking my daughter in for what turned out to be an easily fixable problem with her MacBook) last Saturday; it was packed with iPhone people but we didn’t have to wait (we had an appt) because they had separate lines or something.
I saw the Time Capsule, though.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it. I have a backup drive for TimeMachine, but the Time Capsule is wireless and way bigger and potentially more convenient.
7. Maria Lima on Jul 16th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Toby – you may also want to try an offline backup – mozy.com is a very respectable and reasonably priced system and compatible with Mac.
Sorry to hear it’s such a nightmare, but glad to know they’re replacing the harddrive for free.
- Maria
8. Christopher Weuve on Jul 16th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I feel your pain. The Great Involuntary Hard Drive Cleansing of 1997 still resonates within me.
9. bellatrys on Jul 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Tobias, Kate, you might be amused by this story from MacWorld on why you were not alone.
10. tobias buckell on Jul 17th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Too much crammed into one day. I don’t know if I’d call it a failure as some news reports are, I mean, I have to agree, 1 million sold in a day is not a failure.
But Mobile Me should have been migrated earlier, doing two switchovers at once is just asking for issues…
11. bellatrys on Jul 19th, 2008 at 7:39 am
In my experience in customer service, doing multiple rollouts of *anything* is just asking for trouble!
I can see where someone in management might have thought “if we do it all at once we can get the hassle over quicker” without having the field experience to realize that “but the hassle will be mulitplied by orders of magnitude!” Ah well, they live and hopefully will learn… And hopefully it won’t translate into further delays for getting your machine back.