It has been a challenging week. On Tuesday, while on-site with a customer, the hard drive of my laptop ceased to function properly, rendering my machine unbootable. I wasn’t too worried at the time, because the SMART data still came back normal, so I thought it was probably just a software issue. When I got home, I discovered that my machine’s drive was in worse shape than I had originally hoped. It appears that a large section of the drive’s platter is littered with bad sectors. What does this mean for me? Fortunately, not a major crisis, as I had a relatively recent backup — about a week old. The stuff that wasn’t backed up, I’ve been able to coax from the hard drive of my ailing machine after spending LOTS of time working on it.

Now the next step is to get the drive replaced. What a pain!

So — have you backed up your computers lately?

–Pete