Jim Anning

The hard drive in my macbook started making a strange ticking sound yesterday – 5 mins later it had crashed and couldn’t re-boot. Having calmed down a bit now….

• Everything was backed up – Investing in a time machine was a good plan
• A replacement drive was around £50 – and for that I get 250Gb of storage (so no more messages about hard drives filling up. 60Gb seemed like loads when I bought the thing – but when every download from the digital camera = 1Gb and theres two kids worth of pics / videos to take, it doesn’t last long)
• It happened 5 days before we go to Spain… not 5 days after we’d arrived.

So whilst the downside is £50, a day of using Lisa’s powerbook and however long it takes to replace the drive & press the ‘restore from time-machine’ button…. the upside is over 4x as much storage and a lesson learned (in not too painful a way) about keeping backups.