On loss, and recovery

I have a ter­rible tend­ency to throw what I refer to as “all night work parties”, which usu­ally end up com­prising about two and a half days straight of me staring into my laptop, clacking away and for­get­ting to sleep or come up for air. They’re admit­tedly not the most glar­ingly healthy way of get­ting things done, but I do tend to be the sort of person who works in spurts, and when the fever comes over me, I often like to run with it. (I actu­ally exper­i­mented with a “normal” schedule, wherein I slept at least a little bit every single night for a month straight. It was inter­esting, and I may try it again at some point…but not just now.)

So a few weeks ago, I was crashing at the tail end of a work party, and ended up falling asleep next to my laptop, gigantic glass of water in hand. Yes, you know where this is headed. A few hours later, I woke up spilling said gigantic glass of water all over myself and my poor laptop. (Lovely way to wake up, might I add.) Nat­ur­ally, I pan­icked. There was much cursing and wailing (me) and sparking and crack­ling (the machine) as I tried to figure out what on earth to do. It wouldn’t turn off, and it took my sleep-addled brain a good five minutes to figure out that removing the bat­tery would do the trick. The poor thing was soaked, and ruined. I was in a sim­ilar state. That machine was, in effect, the entirety of my busi­ness assets, and the tool by which I can earn my living, and it had just crackled out and died on me.

Now, a few weeks later, I’m almost 100% back on my feet. I’m lucky, really. I’d been rel­at­ively good about main­taining my backups, so I didn’t lose any­thing too vital, data-wise. I keep my con­tact list synced remotely with Plaxo, which saved me a lot of leg­work. (I’ve since upgraded and it syncs my cal­endar. I did have to rebuild my mon­ster font col­lec­tion (though I think it’s been quite nicely updated and it’s rather nice to start fresh), com­puter set­tings, and the like, which took some time. I use IMAP for my email, so all of my mail, both incoming and out­going, was right there waiting for me, and since my estim­ates and invoices are sent out via mail, I could access all of those, too. My greatest losses were a few selected recent pro­jects that hadn’t been backed up, my time logs, my cal­endar of hosting renewals, the $1800 I paid for a new machine, and about a week of my time.

All in all? Not the end of the world, and I’ve bounced back. (And I have a brand-new laptop that doesn’t sound like a jet engine taking off, which is helping my sanity levels.) I always thought that if my com­puter were to die, I’d be des­troyed. It’s nice to realize that the obstacles you fear most are never as insur­mount­able as they seem–or maybe just that you’re better pre­pared and more resi­lient than you ori­gin­ally assumed.

And not to be too trite, but it’s been a great learning exper­i­ence. For example, I’ve learned that machines and water do not mix, and that I ought to be drinking from a sippy cup when I’m tired. I’ve learned that there are things out­side of my design folder that are important and should be backed up, and I’ve learned that I need a more reli­able (and prefer­ably auto­mated) way of doing backups.

Any sug­ges­tions?

Tags: backups, business, design, diatribes, projects