Backups Only Go So Far

When I went to do a backup clone of my primary computer's hard drive last night, I knew there was probably trouble ahead when DriveClone got part-way done and announced that Drive 0 (that's the internal hard drive -- what I was backing up) wasn't present. Because the clone job had started, the destination drive (my backup hard drive) was also unusable. I almost rebooted to see if that would clear the problem, but realized why that could be a bad thing in time and instead re-ran the clone. This time it worked. However, the next time I tried to reboot, the computer couldn't recognize the hard drive. (That's why it was best to leave it running and retry the clone earlier.)

( A day of frustration with computers )

I fear that I'm going to have to go to double-redundancy here, with two backup drives for each working drive, and clones always going to the older of the the backups. That way, there's a secondary backup if the first one fails this way. On the bright side, most of my data is safe and sound, and all I have is a bunch more tiresome application reconfiguration to deal with. And a lot of stored passwords that I'm going to have to start remembering again for a while.

Overload

Theoretically, my volunteer positions as Chairman of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, SFSFC corporate secretary, web team for Westercon SJ in 2011, Chairman of the Westercon 62 Business Meeting, web team for the 2009 World Fantasy Convention, and Chairman of the 2009 WSFS Business Meeting should not coincide too much, and thus there should not be much of a conflict. Unfortunately, there are times -- and this week is one of them -- when most of those jobs had things all coming due about the same time. I won't bore you with the details, but I find myself juggling a lot of stuff this week, and of course I have a real job that must be done as well. This was yet another reason I was less than thrilled that I had to spend the better part of Monday coaxing a computer back into working order.