A word of advice: If you ever come to a point where you think, “Yeah, I finally have my computer set up exactly the way I want,” you may want to take a few minutes to back up your Home directory.
On Monday afternoon, I arrived to find my laptop making a clunking noise. A quick trip to the repair shop revealed that yes, the hard drive was completely dead. The most recent backup I had was from six months ago.
My first thought was, “Well, if nothing else, at least I can reach that Inbox Zero that Merlin Mann is always talking about.” Fortunately (or unfortunately), I was wrong about that. Any email messages from my work IMAP account are safely stored on the work server, as were any personal email messages that I had filed myself. In my personal Inbox, it looks like any unread messages remain on the server. In fact, the only messages that appear to be completely lost are the ones that were in my Inbox that I read, but neglected to file. I think it’s oddly appropriate that those are the messages that I lost. Let this be a lesson to you: File your email when you read it!
I was also worried about pictures of the kids. Luckily, I had put most of the pictures from the last six months on my wife’s machine at home. The one missing event was our Santa Cruz vacation from a few months ago…but I found those on a memory card at home, completely intact. So it looks like my iPhoto library survived relatively unscathed.
As for the other files, I am in decent shape. I have been very good about backing up my databases (of course), so besides a little extra data entry, those should be fine. I lost all of my text files I created to work with Quicksilver, and of course I lost all of the configuration for Quicksilver itself. That will be the most difficult to recreate, because I have been tweaking my settings for months as I’ve been using it.
So let this be a lesson to you: Back up frequently. In anticipation of the future, I am working on a streamlined layout of my Home directory that will enable me to back up the most important data quickly. When I come up with something, I will let you know.
