I have a saying I like to use in regard to daily life realities; "It could be better, it also could be worse" and I say this mostly remind myself of the fact that in good times and bad, you have to remind yourself that the moment will pass. And I like to think that I do well under certain kinds of pressure. Catastrophe is not a stranger in my life, but I remind myself a lot of cool shit has happened to me as well (I wont get into all of that here tho, maybe someday later)
I bring this up because yesterday I literally avoided a massive catastrophic event. I say avoid, but it was more like rescued from it. See, my Primary Hard Drive failed, and there was nothing I could do to get it to work. This Hard Drive contains more than 15 years of work, 3/4 of a terabyte of Personal Photos of my family and Daughter that only exist on this drive, My Comic book work, art, scripts, comic layout files, Tattoo photos and designs for the past five years, files I keep on more than 200 clients, and thousands more pics of tats on people I don't have files on. Graphic Design, all of the Jade Monkey files and design.... you get the Idea, EVERYTHING, this drive was the back up.
I very nearly had a panic attack. Closing and moving the Jade Monkey didn't feel like the kind of loss that I was facing..
I had hooked it up as I normally do, to go through some files and get what I needed for today's Collector spotlight post, and nothing... it just didn't work. So I took the HD out of it's cute little case and removed the power/connection dock thing and find that it's a SATA drive. My computers still rock IDE so there was nothing more I could do with what I had. By this time I had already posted on Facebook about my plight, and started getting some messages of good people offering their assistance, and a good friend, Henry busted down to the shop to check out what was going on, and then went to the electronics store, got an external SATA docking station, hooked up my hard drive to it and we plugged that into my computer...
Nothing again. It wasn't some other hardware failure, it was the drive. And after the past week, for just a moment, I just wanted to give up. But I've never been good at that sort of thing, so I resolved to plug on, no matter what happens.
Henry took the hard drive home and continued to work his magic. A couple of hours later he texted me to let me know that he was transferring all of my files to another drive, I just have to get him back on the new HD.
Whew. Fucking SAVED! Thank you Henry! You have no idea what you have saved for me, which is more than just a collection of files, but the body of my work as an artist, and the records of my life. As far as physical possessions go, there is nothing more precious to me than what is on that Hard Drive. If my house was on fire, I would save that drive before our cats (before people hate me for that statement, my cats are smart, I wouldn't have to save them, the hard drive can't run)
So there it is, perhaps not so dramatic at story time here, but as a real life experience I felt very close to losing my grip. And only thanks to the help of a friend were my files able to be saved.
Yes, yes I KNOW, and you can be assured that I will have an additional backup of my primary drive in the future, maybe even backups that will be stored with my hard copy "Mourge" (that's what I call the boxes and crates of paper art that I have drawn since I was a kid, and if you're wondering, I'd let that shit burn before the cats, the hard drive would take 2 seconds to retrieve, the paper art weighs about 200lbs all together. )
Just as a side note. It seems kind off odd having these pics breaking up my story a bit, like some sort of commercial or something... anyway...
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