david taus

Back Up Your Back-Ups

music: John Scofield- A Go Go

We don’t realize how much we use certain things until they break or stop working. The basics are pretty much taken care of: electricity, running water. We don’t even think twice when we flip a lightswich or turn on the faucet. The smaller things we depend on follow the same transparent trend; we use stuff without thinking twice. We take for granted that all these little gadgets that make our lives what they are continue to work. It is only when something breaks down when we realize just how much we’ve invested in it. I say all this because my external hard drive stopped working yesterday. And it really, really, really sucks.

The good news is that most of it is replacable. I used the drive as a data repository, predominantly for audio files. The drive housed the entirety of DJ 1ey’s ogg collection, a sizable collection of live shows in shorten and FLAC (including several pay-per-download Phish shows), archives of performances at Murphy’s, archives of some original work, as well as backup files of everything I typed for college and grad school, backups and older versions of the Live Live website, backups of some photos, and backups of this weblog. 1ey’s collection is replacable, as are many of the live shows. I luckily dumped everything I edited and tracked out for Murphy’s back onto Jason’s computer at the bar, so that is safe. I still have originals of all the backups, except for the earlier versions of the Live Live site. The only thing that is gone forever are the master archive recordings of some original work. The highlights have been saved and made into a CD, but the raw cuts are somewhere out there in the digital ether.

It’s true that all may not be lost. There is such thing as data recovery, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I don’t really feel like paying too much for all this to be recovered seeing as though not much was permanently lost, but to get it all back the way it was would be great. I think it’s a hardware thing, which makes me worry a little more. Software I could deal with more comfortably, but after re-installing drivers, checking for viruses, checking to make sure the USB port was working, and checking to see that communication between drive and computer was good, I think it’s pretty clear that the problem lies in the physical. The amber “drive working” light now remains on except for quarter-second blips every two seconds whenever I try to access the drive. The thing hums nicely, doesn’t sound bad, but things aren’t connecting. But it’s not like I can open the thing up and repair anything manually, like when my bike breaks. This is the proverbial black box (it’s blue actually). Any tech-savvy anize’ers (or anyone else) out there who has some ideas?

The drive will go into hibernation for the summer, and as such I’m not really scrambling to save the data. Rather, it will fall into tmo’s care for July and August, which might mean that problem will work itself out by the time I get back into town. But it also means that the majority of my intended projects for Murphy’s are coming to a screeching halt, and some of the music I wanted to bring across the country isn’t going to make it. It also means that I am down 160 gigs of storage and some original recorded music. Which really, really, really sucks.