Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 August 2009 15:01:22
I take a lot of photos [Ed: I think they've figured this out by now.]
I put all my photos on my trusty Western Digital external hard drive, and also use an on-line back up through a company called backblaze.
Backblaze's nifty software was right in the middle of backing up the photoshoot I did at the Rosabrother's rugby club the other day, when, suddenly, the hard drive clicked, the light on the front went out, and my PC no longer recognised it, even though it was plugged in.
I swear my heart stopped. There's 140GB of data on that drive, of which 130GB is photographs.
I started Googling "Western Digital hard drive failure" and similar, and one of the sites I came across suggested swapping out the power cable, just in case it was that rather than the drive. So I started tracing the cable from the drive back to the socket. For some weird reason, the transformer (? whatever it is that reduces the voltage going into the drive) is in the middle of the cable, with a 2-pin plug and socket at one end (the end that connects to the drive, rather than the wall).
"Oooooh," I thought. "I wonder if electrickery things work better if the electrickery is going into them rather than not?" So I plugged it in and it worked and I didn't cry after all.