Tonight, at approximately 9:15 PM, my hard drive gave up. My most recent full backup is about four weeks old (the one I made after last month's scare.) Damn, I hate that laptop. Damn. Damn. Damn. Mostly damn me for going a month without another full backup. I did back up my browser and mail files two weeks ago but none of the release or QA docs I've been working on (save for the ones I checked in to cvs.) Damn. Damn.
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Hei, welcome to the real workd Asa.
My Dell Inspiron 8100 motherboard died on me Sunday. My warranty expired this year (I had only taken 1 year). I paid the machine 2500 dollars without VAT last year, and now I have to pay almost 1000 $ more to get it repared. Nice isn't it?
And at the same time Mr Dell has what? 10 billion $ in the bank?
One think about this laptop is that it already had a hard drive failure, a keyboard replacement. I didn't send it back when I found out that one of the USB port was not working, because it would have put me without machine for a couple of weeks.
Now I am without laptop for at least 2 weeks if I chose to buy a new one.
Back to your problem, let me suggest a solution regarding your next laptop. You also buy a desktop with a similarly sized disk, install the same OS and you synchronize (using rsync) your data every day to your server. If you're often out of home, you put an ssh server and use rsync throught it.
The day your laptop dies, not only do you not lose any data, or perhaps just today's data, but you're capable of resuming operations at once, by using your desktop. It's not portable, but it helps.
I call that "etherogeneous semi-RAID" :)
If you switch to IMAP4 mail system instead of POP3 You can forget backup, at least for mail messages because everything is automatic syncronized ;-)))
Fark that. It seems with every day that goes by, I hear Yet-Another-Horror-Story(tm) about Dell laptops. A friend said that at the company where he works, they've sent 30 of them back for various repairs in his department alone -- all within the past year. In a nutshell, he said "cheap and nasty crap".
Everyone seems to recommend going with Toshiba or IBM if you want reliability (or Apple, if you're not tied to a PC! Mmmm OSX..). I'm currently looking at the Toshiba Tecra S1 -- the Centrino bites at the moment for Linux support (or more importantly, FreeBSD!) of the wireless card, but other than that it looks like a great little package...
Asa, I think now's the time to buy an iBook.
http://news.com.com/1601-2-906298.html
;-)
Hmmm, thanks for the reminder. I haven't done a backup for mumble mumble months.
iBook is more fun, but not always reliable. Mine just went on me today. Well, the screen did. Here's to hoping Apple will repair it (for free) and get it back to me soon.