The Slate Wiped Clean

Sections: Site News Nov 20th, 2005 61 Comments

MotoringFile’s main computer, my generally trusty Apple Powerbook, has just had its IBM internal hard drive recently turn to dust. This means that all MF and personal files from August onward (the last time I backed up) are gone. As this is the machine that I used for MF, work and leisure, it’s going to have a huge impact over the next few weeks. (Fortunately I back up my files from work nightly.)

What does this mean for the site? Well for one the Holiday Gift Guide that was going to be launched tomorrow won’t happen for at least a few more days if ever this year. Secondly any emails that were sent to me directly or through the contact MF page have been lost if they were sent after August 15th. Recently I had a few people email me about helping with MotoringFile. I’m afraid that your names and email addresses are also now gone. Fortunately the site and most of the upcoming articles are stored online and haven’t been affected.

I’m posting this to ask everyone too bear with me for at least a week as I slowly take stock of what’s lost. The hard drive fairlure coupled with the fact that I’m looking at a few busy weeks at my real job is going to make me fairly hard to get a hold of.

Thanks
Gabe Bridger

Written By: Gabe

http://bravo5.org/blog blalor

Did you get ANY S.M.A.R.T. status warnings? Clicking? Is the HD still under warranty (soem HDÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s have a 3 year warranty, even if the laptop is out of warranty)?

Neither of my drives that failed threw any D.U.M.B. warnings; pretty disappointing. I don’t know what’s warranted by the drive manufacturers, but I doubt recovery of your data is included. The first drive that went bad was purchased through OWC; they seem like a good company, but would only replace the drive, and would do nothing to help get my data back.
Tim in MD

My condolences on the data…Two weeks ago the hard drive failed in my IBM Thinkpad T40 (employer-supplied). Wiped out two years of my work as a strategic communications consultant. Fortunately they picked up the tab for $1500 worth of data recovery and believe it or not everything was there. Apparently the Hitachi 40GB drive had a mechanical failure but the data itself was fine. My firm supplies nothing but ThinkPad laptops and our local tech guru says we’ve lost an unusual number of hard drives out of the T40s.

Good luck on the job search…
Pipe

Tim in MD – IBM no longer manufactures computers. Lenovo makes all of their products – and has crappy quality checks which could explain a higher number of dead drives in the T40′s.

Gabe – sorry to hear about the HD dying. Give DriveSavers a shot at recovering your data like Grumpy suggested. I’ve used them in the past and had good luck with them.
Trick

Capn, I’d like to offer Gabe something, but it would be second quarter next year before I could.

By employers, I meant clients/companies I work with. One isn’t going to cut it, well. . . unless you’re a huge fan of Ramen Pride.

My more important point is that Gabe’s resume (and from what I’ve seen of his book) is solid across different fields. I think he could make a go of it, if he’s interestd in being self-employed. Some people aren’t and that’s fine too and I can see that it might be difficult to go on your own once you’ve hit the Creative Director mark.
http://www.motoringfile.com/ Gabe

Thanks for the knd words Trick. Unfortunately most of my recent work has been either for very large (non-local) companies or in house. I really don’t have the contacts that could lead me into a full time freelance gig right now.

I have actually done the freelance thing for about 18 months 3-4 years ago. It was not bad really. Pay turned out to be fairly good and obviously the hours were cool. But I feel that I thrive on interaction with people and working towards a common goal with others. Call my old fashion, but I just love the idea of being a part of something bigger than myself.

Thanks for the suggestions though. Definitely food for thought.

One other thing… in some ways the creative director title is meaningless to me. Granted, I do want to carry on that path managing clients and people if needed. However I’d hate to move further away from actual design at this point in my life. The past two places I’ve been able to do it all so to speak. I’d love to find something like this again. If it means the title is Senior Designer (or whatever), so be it.
Patrick

Gabe, you have gone through all the steps to try and save the data? I had my drive crash on me while abroad and my copy of disk warrior saved me from disaster. let me suggest .Mac service which includes the application “Backup.”

it will let you archive to an external disk, online (2 gigs of online space) or to dvds/cds. i use it with my powerbook and it is well worth the 100$/year just for the remote backup space / email services alone… its something to look into.

Patrick
KE3VP

Hey, Gabe, Just a thought… Does MINIusa or another MINI related company have any openings that would fill the bill. How great would THAT be. They would certainly already know your credentials! Bob/KE3VP
hugh

Gabe: Sorry to hear about the crash. I also do not back up as frequently as I should.

Good luck on the job search. I was riffed at age 55, and let me tell you, it was not easy. Hopefully you won’t have age-ism to deal with.

O-Capn has lots of good advice, but I have a different view about just one thing…some companies will give hiring approval for a position that, for budgetary reasons, must be filled during this calandar year. Otherwise, they lose approval and have to re-request it in next years budget. So don’t be entirely pessamistic about getting hired at this time of year!!!
http://www.rivercityminis.org Deborah / NekoWoman

Gabe — There are places out there that will try to recover data from crashed/erased drives FBI style… by taking the thing apart in a clean room and rebuilding the pieces into a good drive, etc. Not cheap (i.e., starting around $200) but then your data could be priceless… I just lost a hard drive and all the pictures on it. Kicking myself for not doing a backup – my only excuse was that I didn’t have a CD writer in the system, only floppy (yes, it was a really old Windows 95 system being forced to run 98). If I can’t get my data off, I’m going to send it out for retrieval.
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death2all

any1 know which is the better drive for a laptop because i keep seeing conflicting responses all over the net. the E7K100 is designed for 24/7 operation (blade servers, POS vs laptops), so supposedly it operateds at a lower temperature range then the 7K100, but power performance suffers?!?!?! thanx in advance

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