I'm Cursed

[davidgillon]

About a fortnight ago I noticed there were a couple of corrupted files on my external hard drive (which I use as a hybrid of back-up and working drive). They were ones I had other copies off, so no biggie, but slightly worrying. I wasn't planning to do anything about it urgently, but during Amazon's Prime Day sale I noticed a really good deal on a back-up drive, so bought one as a replacement. It's been sitting there for a week while I worked out were I was going to put it because it's tiny and powered via the USB cable, so if I just catch the cable in passing I'm liable to hurl it across the room.

Ultimately I decided the best approach would be to tape it down, and that I'd do the copying today. In the meantime I've been using the original drive without issue, including a bunch of work on it in the last week through right up to last night.

I walk into the office to do that today, and I literally hear the ting-ting-ting of a head crash as I'm between the door and my seat.

Quickly connect the new drive up, and try and copy a file across, and listen to the sound of a hard-drive beating itself to death. Frak!

I'm lucky, because I think I have other backups of everything but the last week's stuff, and that's reproducible. But seriously,  if you deliberately set off to piss me off over it, you couldn't have picked a better moment.

I'm now busy making a backup of my internal drive on the new one.

So I leave that running and go online to book my train ticket to go see my mother next month. I get everything set, press the confirm on the booking, and the LNER websit tells me 'There was an error'. No details of what kind of error,  just 'an error'. So did my booking and assistance requests go through or not? My account says the ticket is booked and there's a booking reference for it, but.... I may not know whether it worked or not until the tickets pop through the letterbox (which should be Monday).

I'm cursed

Comments

OH NOES!

[jesse_the_k]

Please resist the urge to install any new software.

I've got a pair of tiny Samsung SSDs -- smaller than a cigarette pack, thinner than a matchbox -- that are so light they don't fall off their USB-C cable. This is one place where the future delivered!

Re: OH NOES!

[davidgillon]

No chance of installing anything new on the old drive, it's not even being recognised as a hard-drive at the minute.

I'd prefer to switch to SSD, but 4TB SSDs are still pricier than I'm willing to pay (about 2.5-3 times what I paid for the new one). I've just finished backing up my personal files from my laptop onto the new drive and that only came to 83GB, it's the several terabytes of games that are the problem. They mostly don't have the same need for backup, I can just download them again, but I've added a huge number of mod files to some of them, which represents a considerable investment in time, and which aren't easily disentangled from the rest of the game for back up purposes.

Re: OH NOES!

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for educating me re games. I have zero experience, so I was assuming that music or video would be top feeders at the storage trough -- but games have music AND video!

So glad it's still readable enough to back up.

Re: OH NOES!

[davidgillon]

Mostly you wouldn't need to back-up games, but I like games I can fiddle about with, which means keeping back-ups.