Once Was Lost

An ellipsis in the title for this post would make it smoother, but a little melodramatic. So, no ellipsis.

So I wrote a disc with pictures on it for the Russian girl whose name I still cannot spell. About a week later, I had my first hard drive crash and lost about 4,000 pictures I'd taken while here in Japan. Well, she had that disc, so I asked to borrow it so I could copy the pictures onto my new drive (which later ended up crashing...). Well, I thought I managed to lose the disc, so I found all the pictures I could that I had published here and on Picasa Web, and some that I had processed and had random bits of, and put them on a disc, gave it to her and explained what had happened.

Well, I just found the disc that I gave her originally, and it contains all 419 of the original, full-resolution shots from my camera for the Okayama field trip and a couple from the school festival.

I need to clean my room more often.

New New Hard Drive Setup

In light of my hard drive failure and the corresponding 250GB of data loss, I decided that enough is enough, and I've changed my setup around drastically. First of all, the heat can't be doing good things for the lifespan of these drives, so I bought a second external interface, but this one completely surrounds the drive and has a small fan on one end and an opening diagonally opposed to it. Inside that enclosure is a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM with a 32MB cache, and in my normal, slot-it-like-a-tape interface is (yet another) Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM with a 16MB cache.

Now, any sane person, after three WD drive failures, would stop buying the things. But I've figured out my stupidity. Oh yes, that was a fun conversation.

Me: I bought this 400GB drive here about two months ago, and now it's making this kind of clicking noise.
Employee: Uh... How long ago?
Me: About two months.
Employee: ... Do you have the receipt?
Me: You're holding it.
Employee: So I am.
Me: [Wait for 15 minutes]
Employee: It's a little... difficult.
Me: So you can't do it? That seems odd, because I'm looking at these drives and they all have a one-year warranty. Is it just my drive that's just like this one that doesn't? Just the one drive that I bought?
Employee: Yes.
Me: Doesn't that seem a little strange?
Employee: ...
Me: ...
Employee: I'm very... sorry?
Me: Well, thanks for your help.

As it would turn out, the drives that keep crapping out on me were used. Yeah, used. You know what you shouldn't do? Buy used electronics that have moving parts. Yeah. Apparently, you tell them apart by the fact that the used ones have pink anti-static baggies that they come in, while the new ones come in white anti-static baggies. How could I not have known? It's so clear and intuitive. Was that enough sarcasm to make the hate clear?
The best part is that the new ones don't cost a yen more. They're actually cheaper, in some cases.

Still, it's my fault for not asking or something.
If you need me, I'm going to be beating myself about the spleen with this kanji dictionary...

Novel Backup Strategy

I'm having some problems with my external hard drive mess, unsurprisingly. I'm going to do some various things to troubleshoot it, but I'm not particularly hopeful.

I was poking at it when I realized that I've accidentally been performing a kind of backup simply by making regular blog posts. Everything on that drive is either somewhere else as well, or not particularly worth keeping.
All the pictures I've taken are backed up in the States on magnetic and optical media, and the stuff I've taken since coming to Japan, well... I have a lot of random snapshots, but most of the good pictures are up on this blog, which will be completely unaffected if my external hard drive bites it.

Convenient, isn't it?