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Life stops when home computer crashes
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
Living La Vida Loca in turn-of-the-century Silicon Valley is, well, weird. Computers make life easier--and far more perilous. Last Sunday my computer went into a coma, and my entire world came to a screeching halt. Within moments, I also felt lightheaded and sure that only Thorazine would calm me down. My whole life was in that box, and all I got was a blinking icon that would not boot up. Panic set in immediately.
Inside that box--my calendars for the next six months, including every doctor's appointment, baseball game, vacation, dinner reservation, birthday and work deadline. All my phone lists were in there, and all my contacts. Behind the blue screen were my family photos, letters and all our medical histories. Every ongoing item, from school issues and PTA stuff to insurance information, was in there. All my to-do lists for the next two weeks--all of it gone in a flash.
At least I'm not alone in having my life go down. Greg, director of Data Recovery for Ontrack Data Recovery, told me that their home PC business is growing. "We made 25,000 data recoveries last year total, and the home market is expanding.
"Everybody who calls us is pretty much in a panic mode." Greg pointed out. He said there are a lot of reasons for computers fail: "Forty-four percent is related to hardware failure; 32 percent is the result of human error; software corruption accounts for 14 percent," he said.
"Power failures shut down windows improperly (gradually corrupting the system software). Seven percent of failures are viruses, and 3 percent are natural disasters." Greg mentioned that hurricane season (in the fall) and lightning storms are the two heaviest natural destroyers of computers.
Tony, at PC & Printer Connection in Campbell, told me that their business branched into the home data-recovery field last year, and he's seeing the same problems.
Individuals walking in with their computers frequently tell him the machines are dead, he said. "We do get people who are very stressed out. A lot of them, their lives are inside that box." They work at home, the story usually goes: "They have a deadline to meet and it won't even boot up and they don't know what they're going to do. They are exasperated with the whole thing, and there's no miracle cure for it."
I had done backups on my computer, but that was months ago, and the whole hard drive had never been copied. iMacs are notoriously stable, and having a complete failure is almost unheard of.
I spent four hours Monday online with the Apple help line. They had me perform every possible fix, except standing on one foot and shaking maracas at it (something that sounded more productive as the day wore on and my ear wore out).
Eventually, I had to unplug it and carry it to a guru.
Guru's are guys who can fix your box. They work part time (for they are so genius at it that they do not need to work full time), charge exorbitant amounts of money to corporations to save their data, and seldom see the small-fry personal users. I found one locally who takes walk-ins, and, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the guru deigns to look upon the lowly home-computer graveyard and resurrect both the dead and the data.
My new guru, Alex--let's all chant his name--fixed my problem and upgraded me to a better operating system for free. Alex was not impressed with my unique problem that had stumped the brightest minds at Apple. Alex is probably about 22 and a genius.
I just about cried when I got the call that my life would be given back to me in about an hour (just like Lenscrafters!), and that all the data was intact and there was no backup needed. Then I went down and bought him an 18-pack of Bud. You can never bribe a good Guru too much.
Then I brought my baby home. Dust had collected on the empty patch of table where she sits, and I had left a small shrine of flowers there to commemorate her absence. I remembered what Tony had said to me.
"How would it effect you personally? It kind of turns your life upside down for probably several weeks, maybe even a couple months, before you're able to recover from something like that. The time it takes to re-do even the most essential stuff, it's time consuming. It's basically hell."
Tony was right. Even with access, my guru had moved a lot of files when he upgraded me, and things are still "unavailable." This means that I can't find them anywhere. Nothing is really missing, however, and every piece of data is still on my hard drive, somewhere.
Contact Deborah Taylor-Hollis via email at dthollis@metronews.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
