So, this was the first weekend in a while where overtime wasn’t y’know, a thing that was happening. I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend of doing not-a-lot.
Woke up this morning to discover that my beloved iMac had died in the night. Looks like the power supply went. In diagnosing the problem, I managed to kill the power supply for my Macbook, too – looks like a dodgy socket in the 4-gang I’ve been using for some years now. So first things first, off to the apple store for a new power supply for the Macbook. (That’s some fucking racket they’ve got going there, charging 60 quid a throw to replace them.) And I’ve picked at a new 8 gang with monster surge protection, and special indicator lights to let me know if there’s a problem, so with any luck I won’t put my vital electronics at risk again.
Have made arrangements to get the iMac taken away, and probably repaired, but that’s still several hundred quid I could have done without spending. (It’s *just* out of warranty, by a matter of weeks, which is a complete fucker.)
On the bright side: I have lost no data whatsoever. The last backup Time Machine did was about 2am this morning, and plugging the external drive into the Laptop confirms that all is OK. There was a hairy moment when I realised that the backup drive was plugged in to the same 4-gang, but it really does seem to have been a single socket with the problem.
So: I’m going to be annoyingly out of pocket, and I’ve got a few weeks of living with this strange, stunted little laptop screen as my main work space, and a hard drive that’s missing most of my music collection, and my photo library. (And come to that, a machine that really isn’t up to serious photo editing, but I don’t really have anything outstanding, anyway.) But it could have been much worse.
So, because what happened to me can happen to you, I ask: when did you last do a backup? If your computer died today, what would *you* lose?
