I know--it's only Wednesday.
I walked into my office on Sunday morning to the sound of all five (or more?) fans on my G5 up at full speed. That is not a good sign. Usually this means the computer was reset for some reason--probably due to a power outage. Sure enough, there was a fire that effected several thousand people Friday night. All I remember seeing was a flicker, but I live on the other side of town.
Anyway, rebooting the computer did nothing. It gave me the usual Mac startup sound, but then nothing. Like it was stuck in neutral. No hard drive noise, no display at all. Nothing. I shut it down and tried it again, and again, and again.
On Monday I took it to the Mac store (thankfully just up the street) but the warranty had expired so to my surprise, the guy behind the desk suggested I try an authorized Apple tech in town that would save me some money over using the Apple repair.
So that's where I took it. They diagonised the issue as a faulty video card. I should have my computer tomorrow.
BUT--the thing that saved me was an external hard drive. Not just the hard drive but a little software program called SuperDuper. Months ago I set it to backup my internal hard drive. After making an initial backup of everything on the drive, every night around 11:00pm it backs up anything from the day that had changed or had been added. This keeps it very current and keeps the backup fairly short.
So, the very last chart I edited, pdf I ran off, mp3 I added on Thursday was backed up and available for me. All I had to do was plug the drive into my laptop and everything I needed was there.
The only thing I couldn't do was create charts. I didn't take the time to try to configure this computer for the midi and keyboard settings, plus, even though I had access to Finale, I could not use it to print or save since two instances of it had already been registered on two different computers.
So friends, take my advice, even though it appears my hard drive is ok, I've been without my computer all week, but not my data! It could have been a lot worse.
