Friday morning, I decided to take care of some odds and ends on my desktop computer. So I sat down at my desk, hit the power button, and saw something that I have never seen in twenty years of Mac ownership: A grey screen with a blinking question mark. I did what any reasonable person would do, which was to turn it off, then back on again. Same thing. Dug out my trusty recovery and operating system installation disks and attempted to boot from those. No joy.
I went through the first four stages of grief in record time–about fifteen minutes:
1. Denial: Clearly I am still asleep. I started my computer and nothing happened. That happens to PCs, not Macs!
2. Anger: What the hell? This is a Mac! It’s not even four years old yet! It can’t be dead!
3. Bargaining: Let it be a bad processor or something. I can always pull the data off the hard drive later.
4. Depression: Everything else is going wrong, why not this too?
And then I reached stage 5, Acceptance: It’s a good thing I’m so compulsive about backups, because I need to get a new computer up and running ASAP.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with that system–I’m assuming it’s the hard drive, which didn’t make even the slightest sound during all of this–and given that it’s almost four years old, I don’t know that I want to put too much time and effort into finding out. So I am now the proud owner of a 24-inch iMac, which is quite shiny indeed.
I know people say it all the time, but I’m going to say it again: Back up your computer on a regular basis. The last thing I did before I turned off the dead Mac was to run a backup on it–not because I thought something was wrong (I didn’t), but because I back up the data to an external hard drive every night, and several times a year I burn CD backups to keep off-site (at my bank).
Take a minute or two and think about what would happen if you turned on your computer tomorrow morning only to find that you could not access any of the data on your hard drive. If that thought scares the wits out of you, it’s time to back up your files. There are a number of utilities that make this easy. For example, my desktop computer was set up to back up data files to an external hard drive at 1.30 every morning. It required no effort on my part.
I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t had a recent backup. I probably would have had a total meltdown.
Talk to me!