Goodbye Jeanie

I think that I've reached an age, just shy of my 49th birthday, when many too many of the funerals I attend are for my friends. When you're young, if you're lucky, most of the funerals you go to are for elderly relatives, or at least people who are a lot older than you. A grandparent, a great-aunt, your parents' friends, and that gives you one viewpoint on death.

This year I lost two good friends to rare oddball diseases. First, my friend Sharon to pulmonary hypertension, and now, last week, another friend, Jeanie, to aplastic anemia. It's one thing to sit at a funeral with your relatives and people you don't know well. It's quite another to sit, as I did today, in a church with your friends, your peers, the people who revolve around your life every week, and shed tears of mourning for one of your own.

Jeanie was one of those bright lights in this life, that when it winks out, the world is noticeably darker. Always a smile, a giggle, an infectious laugh, a kind word for all. She was the eternal volunteer: Girl Scouts, band, sports, myriad of her kids' activities. Jeanie was always there to help, to lead. She was there with the pixie smile working her butt off.

I don't make friends easily. Many of my friends are first my wife's friends. But I'm proud to say Jeanie was my friend. She's not with us now in the way she's been before, but she lives on in all the hearts she's touched in her life, mine included.

Backup. Backup. Backup.

So it's been a while. Yes. I know.

Recently, it having been a couple of weeks since I'd backed up my PowerBook, I decided to do a SuperDuper backup of the machine. Now I've always known that my backup strategy had a window of vulnerability. While doing a full backup, the backup disk is first erased, and then the new backup is copied onto it. Well what happens if the backup fails after the backup disk has been erased. A small window to be sure, but a window none the less.

Of course back in the day we did rotating backups. I used to do an incremental backup daily and a full backup once a week, rotating between two different sets of media for the week's backups. I even used to store one set of backups offsite in case the building burned down. That was before my source disks got to be around 100 GB each. It just seemed so expensive to maintain multiple actual hard drives to backup my 100 GB PowerBook internal drive.

Well, as you might guess, a rock came through my window of vulnerability. After my backup disk was erased, but before the backup had gotten very far, I had a hard crash on my PowerBook drive, basically destroying the drive. I was left with no source drive, and no backup.

It is somewhat cleansing to have to start from a blank hard disk again. I lost photos, music, financial records, years of email, correspondence, designs, etc. Some I was able to tease with recovery software off of the backup drive. Most are gone.

I did get a brandy new internal drive for my PowerBook. Buy AppleCare for your Apple laptops. It's worth it.

So that's why I haven't been around. I've been busy recovering my digital life. Things are a little better now, but it's quite an ordeal. So the moral of the story is? Backup. Backup. Backup. I've bought multiple bus powered Firewire drives to do backups. I've upgraded to Leopard and I'm using Time Machine to keep my backups constantly up-to-date. I'm taking no chances. This disaster cost me enormous time and money, and it's not ever going to happen again.