I started having computer problems a few days ago. They coincidentally started right after I applied the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update. So I blamed that and decided to deal with it whenever I get a chance. The symptoms: my Mac mini would lock up after I use iTunes or iPhoto for a little bit. I didn’t really think it was a problem with iTunes or iPhoto themselves nor their files since they happen to be the applications I use the most on that machine – so I assumed the computer would lock up regardless of what program I’m using.

Turns out I was wrong. What happened is that the external hard drive that I use to hold (surprise!) all of my music collection, videos, and over 8000 photos was dying. It finally stopped functioning altogether tonight. None of my computers can even see it, much less mount it or extract any data from it.

Thankfully, I recently got paranoid about losing all of this so I went out and bought a big external hard drive so I can use it to back everything up with Time Machine. Not only that, but I got paranoid about losing my data and my backups to theft, fire, or flooding; so I backed everything off-site using Backblaze (warning: annoying autoplay video).

Well done Marcos! Your data is safe and sound, automatically backed up both locally and remotely.

Except this morning I downloaded 107 photos from my big birthday party last night. They never had a chance to be backed up; and I have the -now I realize- bad habit of deleting all photos from my camera’s memory card whenever I download them to my computer. To be continued…