First my car, now my computer— I am not having the best of luck with working stuff lately. The verdict at the Genius Bar on my Powerbook is that the hard drive is toast.
No, I don’t really believe that Firefox caused my hard drive to fail. I don’t think any browser can cause a hard drive to fail; no, not even IE. However, the browser definitely gave the hard drive the coup de grâce.
Now the question is, what did I lose? Luckily I’m good at backing stuff up. I didn’t back up all my recent music purchases, but I get music from Amazon, which I can download again, so no loss.
I have some eBooks I’ll have to see about finding again. Some were free for a limited time, but I believe are backed up on one of my external drives. I lost all my email since I use a client-based email reader, but you know, old email is like old bread–you always think you’ll use it, but you never do.
I do all my web development on my server, or my older Powerbook, so nothing lost there. I had finished all my editing and writing work, so didn’t lose any work.
I have to go through the entire process of restoring my Macports installation, which is going to take time. And I have to prepare to argue with Adobe about the Photoshop license. GIMP looks better all the time.
The hard drive failure could have been worst. I had my recent set of photographs on the computer and hadn’t backed them up on external hard drive yet. Among the pictures were the last photos of Muchana, a gorilla at the St. Louis zoo who died last Saturday. However, I had developed a habit of not removing photos from my camera’s memory card, until I had the photos backed up on external hard drive. The photos are still safe on the camera’s card. A hint to the photographers among you.