Back from the Grave

[Mark Cassino]

Last Wednesday I got up and flipped on my PC only to hear a POP and then 
smell smoke.  A few hours later my worst fears were realized - the power 
supply (which had been going strong for almost 4 years) had fried - and it 
took down almost everything in the PC case.  My three hard drives, scsi 
card, and video card were fried.  The hard drives won't even power up.  The 
CD-R was still alive and, remarkably, the main board was only partially 
fried (the AGP slot is dead but it will actually boot with a PCI video 
card) and the CPU and memory seem to have been unaffected.

I'm now back up and running with a new and better PC bought with money I 
really did not want to spend. And while I backed up the obvious big stuff - 
like my image database - that would take tons of time to recreate, there 
are loads of little things (like my email / address book) that I never 
backed up.  I also lost my most recent CP990 shots (no remorse - nothing 
there of value) and a month's worth of scans...  My old backup strategy was 
to copy stuff onto another drive, figuring that if there was a failure it 
would just be a drive failure - never dreamed that the whole PC could be 
wiped out in one fell swoop like that.

Inching towards the *ist-D, I realize that it will be imperative to 
immediately store the images on some sort of removable image - probably a 
couple copie sof it at that.  I have many boxes of slides and sleeves of 
negatives sitting here - loosing the stuff on the PC is a major pain, but 
it is all recreatable.  Loosing actual images - now that would be bad!

- MCC
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Mark Cassino
Kalamazoo, MI
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Photography:

http://www.markcassino.com