Chris Heuer's Insytes

I can hardly believe it. 2 east coast trips in less than 6 weeks and once again, as was the case with Boston, my laptop has died while on the road.

This time, it is extremely hard to deal with. Last time there was not really much of a loss, other than a few emails and a bunch of photos, which I was able to recover later. This time however, I lost a presentation I was working on for NetSquared conference that is due Tuesday, a ton of important emails, about 100 photos from the Beyond Blogging event, 100+ photos of my big brother and his family, a requirements document I was working on for one of my startups, 2 blog posts I wrote on the plane, the podcasts I recorded at the event and a couple of other important documents I worked on while flying east on the way out here.

Really big bummer and it really hurts this time because so much was lost and will need to be recreated. Worse still, now I am really behind an already overloaded schedule and I have to borrow access on my friend’s PC. Now I will need to take it in to the Apple store tomorrow and get them to look at it and/or perhaps pay one of the data recovery companies a few hundred dollars to retrieve the data.

It would not be so bad if this had not just happened about 5 weeks ago. I thought I was supposed to have a new hard drive after the last one failed under warranty, but perhaps they replaced it with a refurbished one? Regardless, there is not much I can do other than deal with it, defer all the deadlines and pray that the Genius Bar can get the drive up long enough to burn the stuff over to DVD.

The weird bit is how it happened. I was working on the blog posts on the plane, when I went to save them as Word docs and the spinning color wheel came up, only to freeze in place. When trying to restart, it just went from the bright white screen to a grey one. After landing, it restarted in the car miraculously, but then froze. It started a couple more times after that, but would not shut down when I closed the laptop. So on the way home tonight I picked up some CDR’s with the intention of recovering whatever I could get off of it – after many failed attempts, I have finally given up and just hope it might come alive tomorrow.

I am more of a spiritual, not religious sort of guy, but please do pray for something good to happen from this for me. Apple did such a great job in fixing the laptop last time, going really above and beyond. It would suck to know that they gave me a crappy refurb hard drive that died just a few short weeks later causing me all this anguish and loss…