But life has a way of intruding into our plans.
This particular intruder came in the guise of my portable hard drive. The drive where I store all of my photographs.
It had been acting a bit skittish after its Greg Louganis impression in Pátzcuaro. It did not land in water. Just a tile floor. A very hard tile floor.
Hard drives are nowhere near as sensitive as the one in my first PC back in the 1980s. But the drive that took the header was sensitive enough.
I had tried several salvaging techniques to no avail. So, I called on the services of our local Melaque computer guru -- Omar. Together we devised a plan that kept the drive alive long enough to get the photographs transferred to my backup for the laptop.
Yeah. I know if I had done that earlier, I would not have had a problem. But I would also not have had a great tale to tell you.
All of that took about 18 hours. And I am a little tired of staring at this screen.
So, our cavalcade of homes will have to wait one more day.
By then, I may have figured out how I am going to finance this deal.
Financing can be interesting. Mortgages are beginning to appear in Mexico, but they are not easy to obtain and seem to take forever to process, according to folks I know in the real estate business.
ReplyDeleteWhen I bought in Mexico I didn't have enough cash, so I took out a home equity line on my Alaska home, which enabled me to pay cash for the Merida place. I was able to pay the equity line off at closing when I sold the statewide house.
Worked for me. And no house or rent payments is by far the best way to go if you can work it out.
Those outboard drives really are not made to withstand a drop from a table
ReplyDelete;-(
Of course they should be .
I understand there are some portable drives encased in rubber housings. That may be what I need.
ReplyDeleteThat is one of the options I am considering.
ReplyDeleteI though you got the new Sony , z series, the new ones have the memory chips not HD.....next one, eh?
ReplyDeleteYou are correct. The hard drive in the laptop is solid state. But its storage is rather limited. I keep my photographs (about 400 gigs worth) on a portable hard drive. Just like the early PC days when we kept all of our data on floppies.
ReplyDeletehttp://iosafe.com/products-rugged-portable-techspecs Claims 20ft drop-safe--Or http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10036
ReplyDeleteTsk, tsk. You should have at least TWO backups of all your photos according to my personal photo guru, Billie. Now, this will sound bizarre but the one time my hard drive crashed my computer man, aka Canadian Bob, eh?, recovered the data by putting the hard drive in a freezer overnight. Keep that in mind next time, but better than that, follow Billie's advice.
ReplyDeleteal
Billie is absolutely correct. My brother the computer expert fully agrees with her.
ReplyDeleteThe portable hard drive was my backup until I bought the new computer that does not have adequate storage space for my photographs. I didn't get a backup for the "backup" in place before disaster struck.
I know the freezer trick. But it really is the solution of last resort. When the drive comes out of the freezer, condensation starts forming. If lucky, you will get one last read before the drive etches the disc.
At some of those prices, I could wrap my drive in $20 bills and still be money ahead.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. I wonder how bubble wrap would work? It would probably overheat the unit.
And thus, the reason for high prices.
ReplyDeleteI have a LaCie portable in a rubber bumper housing. Excellent drive, runs quietly, unlike the newer Buffalo portable, which whines as it drives.
ReplyDeleteUnless you have a backup program with automatic timing options, remembering to back up is hard to do.
I think those of you with desktop computers rather than notebooks or laptops should find it easier.
I recently got an email from a friend, soliciting my help in restoring the data on a crashed iMac drive. The poor woman lost all her data, including a large collection of digital music, because she had never backed up.
The only positive note in that sad story was that her iMac was still under extended warranty, so the drive was replaced at no charge.
I have my backup on a schedule. Of course, the computer is often not turned on when that schedule comes up.
ReplyDeleteMy backup issue is doubly complicated by the fact that all of my photographs are on a separate drive.-- now the backup. But I need to find a way to back them up. A rubber bumper housing sounds like a good idea.