Head Tale

Had a scary moment this morning when my laptop wouldn’t charge and even crashed a couple times when I tried to get it working.  But luckily it appears that my charging block had simply stopped working and a new one seems to have things running smoothly again (considering I’m still running a 2011-era MacBook Pro that’s had a hard drive upgrade then later, a hard drive failure, a video card replaced, memory upgraded and probably some other work as well, it’s amazing this beast is still running as well as it is.)

Even if you do proper backups, it’s still scary when technology crashes – if your back-up isn’t current or just thinking of all the work it’ll take to rebuild a new laptop/desktop/smartphone to get everything *just* the way you want.

I’ve had a few of these experiences in my life:

• One of the worst crashes I remember was when one of my early desktop computers crashed.  I had no backups at all and all of my life – university papers, etc. – was on the computer.  I found a local repair shop who were able to recover everything but even though it was a Windows 95 (?) era machine (was that the first that broke out of the earlier 8.3 character limitation of earlier operating systems?), all the files got recovered with abbreviated 8+3 character names and have remained so to this day.
• Instead of buying a water camera, I stupidly took one of my earliest iPhones with me to Hawaii thinking it’d be great to geo-tag photos automatically, have access to all my apps, etc.  To facilitate this, I’d bought a waterproof case off Amazon and even tested it with some paper wadded up in the enclosure to make sure it worked before we left.  But the very first day we went to a nearby beach, I don’t know if I was rushing or nervous but I managed to not seal the case properly and when I came out of the water and opened the case, a bunch of water poured out.  “Oh oh” I remember thinking.  Worse, the flash was on and wouldn’t go off, the phone kept getting increasingly hotter and I couldn’t get it to even shut off.  We hurried back to our nearby rental condo and I (stupidly) put it in a fridge to try to cool it off since we had no rice handy.  A quick trip to the supermarket to try the rice trick but it was too late (the rice trick works best on a phone that isn’t powered on when it’s submerged in water I later learned.  And now, most phones are pretty water-resistant or even waterproof so it’s less of an issue.)  Anyhow, I was pretty distraught as we had our whole holiday ahead of us to be without my phone and especially its camera (I also had taken my laptop because I’m a huge nerd so I’d still have Internet/computing).  But a quick trip to Costco and I ended up doing what I should’ve done in the first place.  Except water cameras at the time were like $300 here in Canada which is why I hadn’t bought one.  But in Hawaii, they had a giant display of them right inside the door of the exact same model for about $129 (even with exchange, a great deal.)  And it worked out okay in the end – I’d just upgraded my phone a month or so before we left so it was actually covered under my credit card’s purchase insurance even though I hadn’t paid for Apple Care plus I had a backup from right before we left so all I lost was photos from our plane trip over and of course, any photos of fish I took on that first day! 😉
•  As mentioned above, the video card on my first MacBook Pro went (it’s also gone on the one I’m currently using – apparently a common issue) but that wasn’t a big deal – I ended up buying my current MacBook Pro as a replacement, the place I bought it transferred the old data to the new one since the hard drive was unaffected and off I went.
• I had another iPhone that started acting up last summer and finally wouldn’t take a charge at all, no matter what I tried.  Luckily, I found a local Apple expert off Kijiji and he was able to fix the issue (can’t remember what it was) using spare parts he had on hand and his own skills.  (This connection proved fruitful as I also used him to replace my video card on my current laptop when it went.)

I’m sure there are tons more as most computers/laptops/smartphones you buy are going to die eventually for one reason or another.  It’s helped that more and more of our info – documents, photos, music – lives in the cloud.  But still – do your backups people!