Sparsely Critical

As of yesterday morning at 9:45am, I was finished with my finals for this semester. I have no complaints in that department, but something was on my mind and had been for a few days prior.

You see, I haven’t been able to backup my iMac onto my 400gig firewire HD. This had me really stressing, because I have a lot of irreplaceable pictures that, in the event of a hard drive failure, would be lost forever. The problem was, that every time I tried to back up a large amount of data, it would fail and the Mac would return “Error -36″, which means that read/write communication between the HD and the computer was failing.

Finally, last evening I decided to connect the drive up via USB, as it is a dual connective drive. On USB, the drive performed flawlessly, and I was able to backup my ‘Home’ folder without a problem. The HD is somewhere in the range of a year or two old, and out of warranty. It seems to be working just fine on USB, but I really don’t want to risk a HD failure. Plus, Firewire is faster (arguably), and I’d prefer to use it that way. The dilemma I have is whether or not to replace the unit which would cost money, or risk catastrophe.

One should note that catastrophe would be if the Mac HD failed and the external failed as well, defeating the purpose of backing up.

Why do I feel my blog is becoming focused on external hard drives? Perhaps that should be added as a category. Ugh.

In an effort to stop pharmacy students from filling up the main file server on campus, information resources is going to give all COPHS laptop users an external 80gig hard drive from Western Digital. It’s pretty cool, but defeats the purpose of an off-site backup.