Hardware WILL Fail

I got home from the day job yesterday to find that my laptop was off. Weird. Maybe the cats knocked the AC adapter loose? I turned it back on, setup the IRC client that I always run, and went out. I came back, and again it was off, only this time it was really off. It wouldn’t turn back on.

Then I found that the AC adapter brick was cold and was missing the little green light. It also had a very quiet beeping sound as if someone had placed a bomb inside that was about to go off if I didn’t cut the correct wire. It’s a bit disconcerting.

I found the contact info for Dell, and went through their online support. I was surprised at how great it was. I thought I would need to explain my problem twice to multiple people. Instead, David Brown replied with a simple, “I’d be glad to have the AC adapter replaced. What address do you want me to send it to?” Wow.

So I have to wait until Monday at the earliest for a new AC adapter, and unless I find someone else with a Precision M90, I can’t charge my laptop until then. Luckily my desktop still works.

Of course, it reminds me that hardware WILL fail. My desktop currently acts as a backup, but what about when one of its components fails? I haven’t had a backup system in place in way too long, which is sad because I have bought a few 300GB drives over the past year that have been collecting dust. Now I can probably get 1 terabyte of storage on a thumb drive for $3, but it still won’t do me any good if I don’t make use of it for backup purposes.

If these were just personal use machines, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I’m running a business, and so I need to treat the possibility of data corruption much more seriously than I have been. I would hate to discover one day that I lost the source code to all of my projects.

If you don’t have backup plans in place for your hardware failures, which WILL happen, you’re asking for trouble. Get something in place before it is too late. If it wasn’t for my desktop, I’d be out of commission for the weekend, and I’m worried that the data on the hard drives in it aren’t going to last too much longer. I shouldn’t be worried because I should have dependable backups.

EDIT: Now I know why the AC adapter stopped working. My cats chewed through the wire. They’re lucky they’re cute.

[tags] hardware, failure, backup [/tags]