To a mouse

Posted by Scott on September 3rd, 2008 .

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

There’s a lot I like about living just on the edge of town, large garden, more space, no noisy neighbours etc but there are drawbacks and one of the smaller drawbacks caused a near fatal problem for me… namely a mouse

Recently my computer started making more noise than usual, it was never quiet but even so it was getting painfully noisy, it would seem that a mouse had got into the back through an open pci slot on my computer and must have been hungry as hell because it had chewed all sorts of cable and transistors around and on the motherboard, all this culminated in complete hard drive failure on Monday, it’s a sickening feeling to see your computer die.

Thankfully spurred on by this post Al made about Tyler’s hiccup I decided to buy a USB drive a couple of months ago and started to make weekly backups which windows can do automatically, phew. Pity it happened on a Monday morning which means my most recent backup is a full week old but I’ll live with that gladly!

I have restored almost everything, a weeks worth of emails gone which is annoying but it could have been worse, my whole business, emails, contacts, accounts, receipts could have been taken down by a tiny mouse, little xxxxxx!  I made sure my computer wasn’t the only thing that died that day. So back to normal almost for me, starting to be back into gear and I’ll be looking to be much more productive over the coming weeks.

Image source

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 and is filed under Miscellaneous . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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8 Comments »

Comment by Justin Cook from SEO Toronto Subscribed to comments via email
2008-09-03 20:39:24

You should really look up mozy.com. For $5/month, you get unlimited offsite backup, and it runs in the background, automatically backing up files as they’re created or modified.

Justin Cook’s last blog post..What to do when you’re dropped from Google’s index

 
Comment by Steve from Coffee Beans Galore Subscribed to comments via email
2008-09-04 02:47:32

You can also use gmail to backup your files. I use them to backup my wordpress blog since it has unlimited storage. I think the windows client is called gmail drive.

Comment by Justin Cook from SEO Toronto
2008-09-04 02:57:39

Yeah, but then you’re stuck with a 10MB maximum file size limitation, and you still have to backup manually

Justin Cook’s last blog post..What to do when you’re dropped from Google’s index

 
 
Comment by Amit Bhawani from Tech Blog
2008-09-04 05:21:54

Why not use a rat cake to kill these things because they eat the cake and move out from your place.

Amit Bhawani’s last blog post..What is SCSI & RAID

 
Comment by Scott from Scott
2008-09-04 07:38:41

I back up about 100gb of data from my comp onto the usb drive at present once a week.

 
Comment by Jon from Pension Release Subscribed to comments via email
2008-09-05 14:48:26

Thanks for the mozy.com suggestion, Justin. Can you also use it to backup your website, as well as your local hard disk?

Cheers, Jon

Jon’s last blog post..Starting a Salon - What to name your salon?

 
Comment by Poems from Christmas Subscribed to comments via email
2008-09-06 11:28:31

happily to all of us you managed to restore and make your computer ok. So we are waiting for your new not less interesting posts, ok?

Poems’s last blog post..Christmas Ornament Crafts

 
Comment by John Essex from Loft Conversions Subscribed to comments via email
2008-09-08 15:42:05

Dont forget to also have an extra copy of your data kept off site, or get a firesafe to keep the drive in. I couldnt imagine losing my data, just think of all those accounts, passwords, files that you build up over the years, it would be impossible to get it all back! USB drives are so cheap these days that I have two of them now, one for regular backups and another for a monthly archive backup.

 
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