David Gillon

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