Information is my life

Today was the first Black Friday I haven’t gotten up at 5 am and scurried out to the stores. I didn’t need anything this year. I wasn’t looking to spend the money that was disappearing in my bank account. Nothing to upgrade.

Except.

For an external hard drive.

I have a Windows desktop that is in the process of being rebuilt. The hard drive has all my content as a college student. That computer failed once and I recovered it in 2001.

I have a Powerbook. It has a hard drive that I replaced in the summer of 2005 when the first one failed. It has all my work from graduate school and all my personal data I accumulated since including music and photos.

I have a 60 gig external hard drive with all my work from my last few jobs.

Sure there are several things online—my portfolio website, flickr stream, social networks. They are in the hands of people that I pay to (or read adverts) to take care of my data.

But what if something fails? What if something is ripped from my hands? Muggings, fires, earthquakes, accidental droppage/spillage?

Then I have nothing for a job search or to share with others.

So I am seeking an additional (LARGE) external hard drive. But over and over again, my frugal inner self reminds me that I have survived this long. But there’s the little angel me on my right shoulder that reminds me that when it does happen, I would be willing to shell out $1000 to recover data without a second thought.

1 thought on “Information is my life

  1. I keep worrying about that too. All my data is spread out all over the place now because I have so many backups from previous systems and all these RAW photo images I keep accumulating as I take more photos. I used to back up, but then my drives filled up again.

    I like the My Books because they have an auto on/off feature and they have a clean design. I was mulling over getting my first one until I was tired of worrying and got the dual drive My Book and configured it with RAID 1 because I store the only copy of some files on there.

    Someone once made a similar good point to me when I expressed hesitation in the costs of a backup hard drive… it shouldn’t be about how much the hard drive is worth, but how much your data is worth to you.

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