You guys, I’ve spent the last 5 days living without a computer.
WITHOUT A COMPUTER.
I survived solely on an iPad and iPhone and while it’s not anything I’d like to do again any time soon, at least I know it’s possible.
But the story!
So over the last couple weeks, my computer’s been gettin’ all slow and freezy and buggy and weird, getting to the point where every single program would stop responding if I tried to use it. Hot. Mess.
I brought it in to my local Apple store, and the über helpful hipster genius at the genius bar, Brenden, ran a quick diagnostic on it and lo and behold, my harddrive was failing.
Womp womp.
So he sent me home to back up my hard drive so I wouldn’t lose my data and set me up with a concierge to set up an appointment to bring my iMac back.
That meant a trip to Fry’s to find an external hard drive on the cheap, because as I was advised, most harddrives are the same on the inside (read tiny, fragile, moving parts), so the best one will be the best value. Unless of course you’re shelling out several hundred dollars for a solid-state hard drive, which is apparently virtually indestructible. YAYYYYY indestructible! BOOOOOO super expensive.
Found the external. WHEW. Held my breath and crossed my fingers for about 6 hours while my computer backed itself up to said external hard drive.
Back that thang up!
IT WORKED! Huge relief, because my failing hard drive could have failed before I’d finished backing up, and there would have gone my data and files and photos and AGH that would have sucked, but it didn’t, so YAY.
Brought my iMac to the Apple store, was again greeted by über helpful hipster genius Brenden, who packed it up and sent it on back for fixin’.
And then I waited.
And waited.
And waited for 5 freakin’ days. 5! Do you know how uncomfortable that feels to not be able to work for 5 days?! I tried to pretend I was staycationing, but I’m not what one might consider good at fooling herself.
So then last night at 11pm, I get an email that says “Your product is ready for pickup.”
AGHHHHHH!
I was whining in my head, but thought, well, at least it’s not an entire day of waiting.
And now here I am. In front of my glorious 27″ of computer. I may or may not have hugged it as I took it out of the box.
So a few takeaways for all of you:
- Back up your data! Get an external hard drive and backup frequently. Apples have Time Machine which does all the hard work for you – all you have to do is turn it on.
- Hard drives are fragile, no matter what kind of computer you have (unless, of course, it’s a solid state drive).
- That said, when you buy an external hard drive (WHEN, not IF because it’s just that important), the brand doesn’t matter. Just get one that meets your storage needs and has a reasonable price.
- Have I mentioned how important it is to back up your data? BACK UP YOUR DATA!
So that’s that! You can look forward to lots of excitement around these parts… but hopefully nothing as exciting as potentially losing all of my photos, music, and data.
