Today, waking up on my sofa realising I left my computer on all night, I noticed that my trusty backup USB drive wasn’t working. This drive has been with me through thick and thin for about 3 years, I’ve taken to Japan 4 times!
Also this drive holds my entire working life. And now it seems, all my work has gone.
The list of things on there is too great to detail, but I recently migrated all the movies etc off it to another drive, leaving it purely for work. I even had some documents open when it died. It houses all of my reference material, every scrap of illustration I’ve ever done and all of my work from the past 8 years.
Thankfully I migrated all my email, personal photos and music to my mac from the drive. At least I can get all my important documents from my mail, which is handy (when you’re taking someone to court!). But as for the rest of my digital life, I can just wave goodbye.
I still need to try some other software (disk warrior) on the drive, but it costs $80. My mac tells me it’s a FAT error (which would imply that the file table has become corrupt). Recently I’ve been guessing that the drive was getting de-fragged by the mac when it’s idle because of the data clicking away. Also the mac was set to turn the external drives off (I have two) automatically when they are redundant.
Needless to say, this is a big shit.
If I get the drive up and running again, I will burn a few DVD’s of my most important stuff – for example: my clients!
Luckily, I’m not in the middle of anything major right now. I was working on notion designs re-newal but it was only a template and I have the base image in my email.
fuck fuck fuck :/
It hasn’t really sunk in yet. If I can’t repair it or if the drive is corrupted nonsense, I will have lost years of work, image reference and documents.