Rotten Apple®s

A word to the wise: backup your hard drive early and often.

I've been blessed with several years free of hard drive failure. In fact, I can't recall the last one I've had fail without some early warning signs.

All that ended last Monday.

I have been the proud owner of a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo since November. It rocks my little musical world. I run Logic Pro 7 and it's just killer – and it's portable! I was even mixing a recording of live show on the car ride back from Eastern Washington just to get a jump on things for a project I'm working on! Even Cubase 4 runs like it never did on my PC! Yes, even Windows® Vista™ ran great under BootCamp (with much tom foolery and hackery).

Then last Monday happened.

It always happens when you don't expect it.

If you expect it, you've got another problem – paranoia; but I digress.

I get up in the morning and open the Dashboard to check the weather – just as our Lord intended it. (Because opening Windows® is silly*.)

The whole thing locked - hard. Nothing moved. When the mouse stops moving, you know you are in trouble. Reboot? Nada. Just the click, click, clicking of a dazed and confused machine unable to get to the comforting grey on grey Apple® logo.

I took the MacBook Pro to the genius bar at Bellevue Square Mall. After much help from the guys at the counter, they figured the problem was the logic board (a.k.a. motherboard to PC users). No theoretical data loss.

Or so I thought.

I went back into pick up the machine on Thursday and to my horror the hard drive had been swapped! They went and did all they could to resuscitate the data from the damaged drive to no avail.

Here's what I lost on the drive:

• Almost all of the pictures I took since Christmas Day!
  
• The masters for Tom Curran's theme music for Sound Insight (on Sacred Heart Radio at 8 am)
  
• Preliminary mixes for Soul Food Books' CD project
  
• Experimental source code I was working on
  
• My Microsoft® Money™ files
  
• All my recent demos for the LIFE TEEN band at St. Vincent
  

Needless to say, I was upset – very upset. I could have taken the damaged drive and paid someone else to recover the data and replace the damaged drive in the Mac at another store. The problem would still remain – I would not have a reliable backup system for otherwise valuable data. I decided to learn a hard lesson and buy a backup drive instead.

Fortunately Tom's basic tracks are done, and I can record additional his additional needs separately. I was able to recreate the Money™ files from an older backup, and the Soul Food masters are all safe and sound.

How does this all relate to music ministry? Think of everything you have saved on your computer relating to your ministry. Here's my short list:

• Live recordings of the band
  
• All our sheet music
  
• Demo recordings
  
• Song sheet files
  
• Historical band photos
  
• A database of everything we've done since 1999
  
• Source code for generating song sheets and overheads
  
• Masters for my CD
  

So if you don't have a backup plan, get one. Do it at least ONCE A WEEK.

*Like you were going to get out of this post without a joke like that.