All charged up
Although this is not a recent photo of the battery that came with my MacBook Pro last June, it is an amazing simulation. A twin, if you will.
A couple of days ago I noticed that one of my business laptops had, well, a wobble. Although lying seemingly flush on my desk at my office, it had a distinct sway as I typed on it. I flipped it over and saw that one corner of the base of the battery was lifting off, creating a metallic flipper of sorts. I pressed it firmly back in place and it peeled away again. It seemed like a situation caused by glue that was no longer joining two discrete surfaces. The battery had some sort of problem requiring immediate attention.
And then I did what we all sometimes do in such situations: nothing. Because I couldn’t envision being without this laptop (which is what I thought a trip to an Apple service station would entail), I thought I’d do nothing, at least for now.
But then I dwelt on it. And realized that my entire writing and business careers (hopelessly entertwined) reside within this laptop and that not all of it is backed up. Quickbooks, yes, to my .Mac account. Same with my calendar, contacts, and so forth. Most of my creative writing has been backed up to one of the desktop machines at home. But did I have all of it stored in one easily accessed backup location? No. So I went to CompUSA and bought a Maxtor 320-GB hard drive with backup software and backed up everything from this laptop, all 116,000 documents. It took about 18 hours, and there’s the irony:
Because the backup took so long, the laptop overheated and the battery cracked nearly in half.
Imagine my reaction seeing this in the morning: the laptop battery is clearly a goner, and while I hope the laptop isn’t irreparably damaged, I do have insurance. So the real question becomes, Is my data saved?
A quick check to the Maxtor showed that it was all on there. I turned off the laptop, obverted it, took out the battery, and surveyed the extreme damage — much like the photo above, but worse. In the photo above you can’t see a complete crack of the plastic shell. You also can’t see grave concern writ large on my face.
The laptop itself is fine, it turned out — I’m writing this on it — and everything is cogently backed up. A quick trip to my local authorized Mac dealer resulted in a new battery, at a cost of $129 plus tax. I didn’t lose any data, and the battery is under warranty from Apple, so a replacement is winging its way to me. So, no harm, no foul.
But this incident has made me think what it would feel like to lose all the data I have been shuttling forward from computers for years and years and years now, dating back to stories I wrote on a IIGS in the late 1980’s. In short, it wouldn’t feel good. At the same time I thought that, though, I figured that I would get over losing all of it and would just write more, and that might even be a good development, freeing me further from the past.
So, in 2007, here’s the verdict: Despite my attempts at cynicism while I was an undergrad, and my decidedly skeptical viewpoint, I am indeed a glass-half-full sort, the kind of deranged optimist who sees the loss of all his data as an opportunity.
One day later, I see it’s an opportunity I’d rather not seize.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
A few years ago a guy I was then working with was completing his degree in sports marketing at the University of Delaware. He was almost done three papers he needed to finish course requirements when his computer got hit with a nasty virus. The virus could not be cleared with any anti-virus software. He had a friend who worked for Dupont Chemicals in their IT department take a look at it. The verdict was that the virus could not be cleared. It would not even allow the hard drive to be reformatted. To maker the matter worse, he had not backed up any of the work he had done on the papers.
When I went back to school I learned from his example. I made sure to have copies of the papers and the research I was doing safely backed up.
Paul
March 6th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Because I’m on the Mac platform, I haven’t been as concerned about viruses. (We Mac people sat back and watched the “millennium virus” joke played on PC users around the globe.) And, as I said, I have always backed up my data — even when that meant, at one point in the 1980’s, about 80 floppy disks (recently landfilled). My recent concern was more about how easily I would be able to put it all back without losing much time if this particular laptop did indeed crash.