Clean Slates...

In the year 1914, Thomas Edison's "invention factory" (as he called it) burned to the ground. Of that disaster, he is quoted as saying, "All of our mistakes have been destroyed. In a new factory we can start our experiments with a clean slate."

Several years ago, I had a hard drive die and I lost a good bit of work for a horrific few weeks. However, I had a good backup and at most lost a month of work. I've actually thought that my back up system I've been following for years now has been pretty sound. I usually have two back up drives backing up my main work drive. That seemed like a pretty good method.

Well, after I finished school I let one of my back ups go and only had one. I thought that would still be plenty.

Two months ago, I had a hard drive fail. My main work drive that is. I worked about a week on the main drive trying to get it back and it just wouldn't respond. I tried absolutely every diagnostic app I could find (windows or bootable) to no avail. I was in the middle of my freelance gig and didn't have time to mess with it, so put it aside thinking I'd get backup drive and be up and running when I had some time. So, when the project was done, I tried that.

Come to find out, the back up drive didn't seem to wanna respond either. I figured I'd be able to fix em...prolly just a bad sector or something. This past weekend, I finally got a replacement drive and installed it and took a hard look at my backup. I ran some diagnostics and....

Dead as a doornail.

Uh oh.

So, it appears that I've lost the past 6 years of freelance, reference, school and personal work. The only things I have are my most recent project, The Potter and an assortment of 3d projects. Where this mainly sucks is that I've lost all the source files for all of the websites I've done. So, the next update to my site other than the blog is going to be a complete redesign. That's not such a bad thing, it's been a while. However, I did lose a few things I'd have rather not have.

Now, I could pay some outlandish $1k or more to try and have a company recover the data, but I'm not gonna do that. It's just stuff and that's a lot of moola. So, like Edison (and pretty much only in this way as he was an absolute genius), I've got a clean slate. Not really all that bad of a place to be when you really think about it.