KEY POINTS:
To whom it may concern: My daughter is unable to complete her assignment today because, on Saturday night, we suffered a catastrophic disk crash. Unfortunately, Monika has not made a backup of her work. I have taken the comatose disk to the data recovery people, but it doesn't look good ... "
This modern take on "the dog ate my homework" may sound like a creative excuse, but sadly it was true. The NCEA photography assignment wasn't the only loss. Digital photos, music, documents, interviews - vast swathes of our family's digital life was now in suspended animation, caught in a twilight zone somewhere inside a sliver disk platter that steadfastly refused to spin.
Fortunately, some of our digital life had been backed-up - wisely copied to CD and DVD. But quite a lot wasn't. I had become lazy, some would say reckless, lulled into a false sense of security by having a new computer. Backup was something I was meaning to get around to, but had kept putting off for another day - for about 18 months.
How could I be so stupid? And how could I have ignored the imminent disk failure signs? What monstrous denial had possessed me to believe the strange humming sound and erratic behaviour of the PC was just a noisy fan? But as the sound got louder and the disk fell silent with a sickening graunch, the chilling reality settled. Disk kaput.
So began a week of hell. Wharf IT's Sacha Stevens eased the pain by replacing the dead drive and getting my PC going again - on a Sunday no less. I took the inert disk to IT Sales and Services' Mike Sanders. He works on a "no charge if I can't recover it" basis. A day later he had more bad news - my disk was one of the two or three a year that he can't coax to spin again.
Who do you call in the darkest depths of disk despair? Computer Forensics run by PC industry stalwart Brian Eardley-Wilmot. But there's a catch. To perform miracles - bringing data back from the dead - costs ... a lot. In my case $90 just to look at the thing and then $843 to recover what they could.
It's the sort of quote that prompts a reassessment of priorities. Perhaps we could regard the disk crash as a fresh start, a spring clean, a welcome release from the tyranny of data that controls our lives.
Tempting as the idea was, the tyranny won. The NCEA assignment wasn't easily redone. Then there was the swag of photos with sentimental value. Plus some documents and interviews that would have been difficult to do without.
Computer Forensics said our disk crash was so bad "the magnets had fused to the spindle." Whatever that meant, it couldn't be good. Opened up in the clean room and spun again, the disk made dreadful death throes screeching. Even the technicians were afraid.
The platter was also ringed, which is when the reading head digs a deep furrow in one of the disk tracks over which no data may pass. We did get most of our data back. The email was unrecoverable and, as Eardley-Wilmot so eloquently put it, about 30 per cent of our photos were "poked" - there, but corrupt.
My digital recordings in Panasonic's VM1 format were a nightmare. Bizarrely the format doesn't allow copying - resolved eventually by converting the cloned files to WAV format.
Just when it seemed normal service was resuming, I found several of my back-up CDs were unreadable. Disk failure, plus backup failure. What had I done to offend the gods of computing so much? Fortunately I was able to read the disks using a couple of nifty utilities - BadCopy Pro and CD Roller.
I remain mystified as to why disks, even newish ones, fail - something to do with mass production of ever bigger, faster, cheaper models I suspect. But the PC industry's Achilles heel - its epic vulnerability with fatal consequences has new meaning for me.
I now back up obsessively - via an automatic schedule using SyncToy to copy files to a newly acquired 600GB external drive. But I trust nothing, neurotically checking to make sure the backup works. When you've been to brink of disaster and back, digital life is never quite the same again.
