Back Up Your Fuck Up

I took my Lacie 250 Gig & Fanthom Drive 250 Gig to show work in progress at a client's office. (I didn't have time to render it out and burn to DVD, so I upgraded to fast G5 today, but that's another post.)

I got there and plugged my drives in but nothing happened. What? My producer is looking over my shoulder and I had sinking feeling running through my vein. Lacie drive was blinking but it wasn't recongnized by the computer. I plugged in and out to no avail. But suddenly, I smelt silicon burning. Handling computer nearly all my life, I knew what it meant. The drive was fried. Oh shit.

It turns out that those two drives use SAME plug, but Fanthom adapter uses a little higher amp, that totally fried Lacie drive. When I took it to Tekserve for repair, their technician declared it totally dead, RIP. My only option was to give up the drive for 7 days for the data recovery in the price range of $1300. Fortunately my FCP project file was backed up on my laptop, and I lost minimal amount of original footage that was quickly recaptured that day because I kept Lacie drive relatively empty to transfer files between my other drives and my producer's drives. Regardless, the damage was done. When I assessed the final damage, I found out that I lost two days of work, $200 drive which was promptly replaced with a 800 gig G-Raid drive.

Live and learn. I will implement vigorous weekly backup plan from now on, if not daily. Always have two projects going in separate drives. Redundancy pays, in profesional environment & save lives.