The Edge of Disaster

Well….. this morning, I woke up and started working on one of my many projects…. this one, a photo realistic skin (not the aforementioned project) which I had been working on for almost two weeks. Suddenly, there’s a click click click, a message pops up, “Delayed write error.” What? Then my drive vanishes from the list of accessible drives…. my hard drive just crashed, a horrible click sound comes from the casing….. then nothing. The drive is dead, completely and utterly dead. All my texture work has suddenly gone missing, not to mention photo work I’ve done outside of Second Life….. all… gone. Software backups, everything!

Okay, now….. this wouldn’t be too bad if it were expected. The thing is, this was a brand, spanking new hard drive….. and it was a month or so old. It was the drive which I had intended to replace the main drive if/when it failed. So, I opened the casing on the hard drive (it’s an external) and looked to see if there was anything I could do to bring it back to life. To my lack of surprise, the drive itself was a Seagate (a brand I had swore I’d never buy again because Seagate drives’ very nature is to crash and die)….. so, $170 wasted, a 320 GB paperweight, and over 100 GB of data which can’t be recovered gone. And sadly, I can’t return the drive because much of the data is photo work for people who would rather their photos not happen to fall into someone else’s hands….. so, in the off chance it gets repaired of falls in the hands of someone who could recover the data, it has to go dumped instead.

Anyway…. so, I took a deep breath, looked at my other projects…. and decided to restart the skin from scratch. After all, if I did it once…. I can do it again, and this time better.

And, I will have to go buy a couple new backup drives…. and I’ll be making sure they’re (a) under 120 GB each since high capacity drives are more prone to failures, and (b) they’re not Seagate drives.