It's funny how there are times in your life when you do something - with the best of intentions - but suddenly an unexpected sound blares or unknown light flashes in that split second and you realize you just made a HUGE mistake. Mine was the sound of an engine slowing down to a complete stop and the infamous folder with a question mark on my normally bright, now dark, screen.
Without panicking (a first), I did what any professional would do first - reboot. After getting the same error message, I followed the next step in "how to fix a computer on your own without having a clue as to what just happened" - I pounded on the computer with my fist. Still no luck (amazing, I know).
After heeding the advice of our IT gal-on-the-road ("go to the Mac store IMMEDIATELY"), I took my barely one year old PowerBook to the Michigan Ave. store and hoped they would tell me I just needed to clean the heads. Or rewire the interface. Or something.
No such luck. Everything was just... GONE. I got a new hard drive, so the computer itself is working, but the things I had been listening to and working on and looking at... lost forever.
I discovered a few very valuable pieces of information that day:
1) A hard disk drive (HDD) is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. (Thanks to Wikipedia too.)
2) The HDD on a PowerBook G4 is located to the left of the trackpad (how was I supposed to know? It's inside somewhere... just didn't think about it being right THERE).
3) Magnetic avalanches (which can cause sections of hard drive to lose data) occur when a magnetic head hovers over a patch of disk drive causing the polarity of that part of the drive to change its alignment or spin.
4) Even if Mac created a sold a product with a magnet in it - and didn't really give a head's up warning that it would be a REALLY BAD IDEA to put it near a hard drive - don't, under any circumstances (unless you really want to wipe your hard drive out), put that magnetic piece to the left of your trackpad!
The bad news is that I wasn't backing up as I should have been (you think my million PC crashes would have taught me something) and I lost three months worth of emails, documents, and most importantly, photos: my second trip to Australia, my Canadian cross country run, girls' weekend in Asheville, kids from Rocketown, visits with friends from my West Coast June stops (Fussy, JC Daly, C. Storm, Melanie, the Concord family (Denny, Erick, baby-in-belly Wilson, Becky, Ally), Uncle John & Karen, Amy & Russ, T.Bug, Allibird & Ever, and Hallie Rose).
Hopefully those memories will stay etched in my mind forever. Just in case, I'd better keep all magnets away from my brain. You never know what else they could erase.
