Starting over. Again.

Years ago, when I was a junior in college, I lost all of the contents of my beloved Apple G4 computer when the hard drive crashed. I was majoring in multimedia and graphic design, and the crash wiped out my entire portfolio. I had to start completely over.


When bad things happen, I tend to cope by trying to find the lessons that can be learned from the situation. The lesson I learned from that crash years ago was to always back up important data. And I did. For a while.

For quite some time, my aging 2002 Mac has been making weird noises and if you tried to shut it down, it would restart instead. I kept thinking I needed to take the computer in and have it looked at, but I never got around to it. I kept thinking I needed to buy an external hard drive and back everything up, but I never did. It was too expensive, I'd do it later, on and on. Besides, I had some data backed up here and there on CDs and thumb drives. I wasn't worried. Surely the old girl would carry on!

Then one day last week, the computer began behaving strangely. Applications wouldn't open up and everything was running really slowly. I printed off my packing slips and shipping labels for the day's Etsy orders, and then restarted the computer to try to get it working right again. It never came back.

I took the poor dear into the Apple store and they managed to get it up and running again through their Genius Bar voodoo magic, but they weren't able to retrieve any of my data thanks to a little thing called FileVault, which comes standard with the operating system. If you have a Mac, and you use FileVault, turn it off this instant! I mean it, stop reading this, open up your System Preferences and turn it off right now.

The guy at the Apple store described FileVault as a "Department of Defense level of data encryption." It comes with the following handy warning:
"WARNING: Your files will be encrypted using your login password. If you forget your login password and you don't know the master password, your data will be lost."

This didn't exactly make me shake in my boots when I first turned on FileVault. I thought securing my data against all sorts of computer threats was a good idea. Was I ever wrong! The warning should really go something like this:
"WARNING: Use at your own risk. If your hard drive fails, and you don't have your data backed up, you will lose everything. Don't think the guys at the Apple store will be able to help you in the event of a crash, because they won't. They will only roll their eyes at you and make you feel like an idiot by saying, "You have FileVault turned on?!" like you're supposed to know that this is an obviously stupid and dangerous thing, which of course you would expect from something that comes standard with the operating system. Seriously, don't turn on FileVault unless you've got all your data backed up on an external hard drive, or preferably two, with one drive located on site and the other stored in a safety deposit box, fireproof vault, or possibly the Vatican."

So, now I'm starting totally over, trying to retrieve what data I can from my little collection of CDs and other disks. I'm reinstalling all of my software. I have lost all of my images of my pottery and jewelry, save for the ones that have been uploaded to Etsy. I am relearning all the lessons I learned from that first computer crash years ago, which stings a lot more than learning them the first time.

I've purchased a new little Apple Mini to replace my dead G4, but more importantly, I bought a shiny new 500 GB external hard drive that backs up my computer every hour. I'm not doing this a third time...