Corrupt Ancestors (and Other Hard Drive Problems)

This will be a short and belated post. A few days ago, my ancestors became corrupt. I didn’t find them in prison or court records. I found that they were imprisoned on my computer’s hard drive. Presumably they were doing hard time.

When I would normally have been writing something genealogical, I was instead erasing a hard drive. Not something for the faint of heart, but it might have been much worse. Let’s cover the moral of the story first-

Back up your data.

If necessary, to convince yourself that this is important, follow these steps-

  1. Take a small USB hard drive that is not currently connected to anything.
  2. Hold it by the end of the cord away from the hard drive.
  3. Lift it so that the drive dangles at eye level.
  4. Set the disk gently swinging, left and right.
  5. Repeat quietly to yourself, “I will stop swinging this disk like a nincompoop, and instead use it to backup my data.”
  6. You can stop swinging the disk once your trance becomes deep enough to overcome all anti-backup inertia and actually back up your data.

The worst part of my hard disk problem was the time wasted trying to fix it some clever way. When I eventually realized that the best thing to do was to bite the bullet, take a deep breath and make use of my backups, it went fairly smoothly. I’m pretty paranoid about backing up. I have and incremental backup that is updated every hour to an array of hard drives. Even if one drive fails, the data is still there. I also have a clone that is updated daily. A clone is a special type of backup, not a new offspring type that you can set in your genealogy software. When all else fails, a clone can be used as a boot drive for starting your computer. I couldn’t start my computer from its drive but I could start it just fine from the clone. I knew of a few files that had been updated, so once I got the computer started, I could find them on my hard drive and copy them to a thumb drive, just to be sure I had them.

Then I did the scary thing. I erased my computer’s hard drive. Even if you are sure that you have everything on a back up, pressing that erase button is hard. Once it was erased, I copied my clone to it and my computer was fine. All I needed to do was to restore the few files that I had updated. Now it starts up just like normal.

Let’s repeat the moral of the story-

Back up your data.

Your flesh and blood ancestors may never have needed a “Get out of jail free” card, but you never know when your digital ancestors might become imprisoned if you don’t back up.

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