My MacBook dropped from a bed height when I accidentally give it a kick while playing with my baby girl Giselle. I reboot my MacBook while holding the option key, boot into recovery, fire up Disk Utility and confirmed my WD500GB HDD have failed. I was not panicking. So what pill I took?
What you need to know as we advance further into the post PC era?
- It’s important that we backing up data in real time and not periodically.
- Invest in cloud backup service; pay less attention to local/physical hard drive.
- Get a good and expensive Solid State Drive (SSD)
If you are still talking about getting a terabyte of hard drive for backing up data, you are looking at the future in the wrong way. You are still trapped by the pass.
Almost every devices ship in today’s standard has the capability to sync data across the cloud, there’s no way for you to still manually getting a USB hard drive and stick it to your PC.
Backup your data in real time will make sure your information stays fresh up to the second before disaster strikes. Let just say that backup in real time is your personal accident policy.
I have learned to appreciate the benefit of having services like iCloud, Dropbox, Skydrive, Box and Google Drive. These free services let you backup in real time. I can access this data with my iOS app or Android App easily at no cost of down time.
[box] Get Dropbox for free [/box]
Suffice to say I am protected even though my HDD failed to load.
Unless you are spiritually committed to your backing up of data manually on a daily basis; not too tired or lazy to do it, use the cloud for data backup. Period.
I complain about the price of a SSD a lot. I’m not an early adopter. If a dollar is equal to 100gram, for the price of a 120GB Intel SSD 330 series; it can break your foot if you drop it — on your foot. That’s how expensive is this beast. But well, I seem to have shut up because the performance on my 2008 MacBook Aluminum is out of this world.
Now that I have made my points, it is time for us to upgrade our mindset, use SSD and use the cloud. The benefits;
- SSD handles water and drop well compared to a spinning hard drive.
- SSD work silently and fast. Almost no waiting time compared to a spinning hard drive. Opening up apps and editing images noticeably faster.
- Cloud storage lets you sync data in real time and automatically. No maintenance, bring it everywhere with you; zero weight and obviously you can’t drop a cloud on the floor like I did with hard drive.
I like to close by welcoming you to the future of SSD and cloud!
9 responses to “Dropped my MacBook, HDD fails and saved by the cloud”
I find the title “What you need to know as we advance further into the post PC era?” rather amusing since Macbooks have the same components as PCs, just with a different OS. The PC is being redefined, not ending.
I backup my Windows machine to the cloud, but I will always have an external hard drive as well. Number 1, is I don’t 100% trust the cloud, and probably never will as anyone can be hacked and my data compromised. Of course, Number 2 is I don’t always trust external hard drives, which is why I backup to the cloud as well.
The biggest reason I don’t only rely on the cloud for data backup is because I have over 400 GB of data backed up and don’t wish to restore all that data over the Internet. Of course, I can request physical media (hard drive) from my cloud backup provider, but it is easier to restore from my external hard drive and then download only those files that aren’t on the hard drive.
Hi Pual!
I will still be getting another new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air soon. I agree with you the PC is being redefined and not ending.
I am excited to see what the post PC will be bring more to the table. Frankly speaking i’m bored with the traditional computing.
I like how iOS and Android change the way we interact with devices. Microsoft Surface is just a start (I hope, contradicting the be belief of DOA), Ubuntu and Firefox OS development will adds more choices to consumers. One of these days we would be not so PC anymore and that’s a sure thing and that’s what excite me most.
ZDnet Matt Baxter-Reynolds nailed it when he says — The PC’s not dying. It’s just an easier thing to say than “the PC’s going niche”.
Thank you for your comment, Pual. I really appreciate you take your precious time to comment.
Thank you
seems you got an inspiration to write this http://technicallyeasy.net/2013/05/the-pc-isnt-dead-the-technology-world-is-just-shifting/ as answer, Paul 🙂
Yet, you’re mission one word in your article – fashion , yes in tech world too, many people buy gadgets due to fashion
The funny thing is I was thinking about writing such a post for some time even before this post. I wrote one about a year before, but I figured the topic has been picking up steam recently.
Just realise I spelled your name wrongly. sorry.
No problem. You’d be surprised how often that happens – by me :).
in cloud you entrust your (confident) data to 3rd party.
I am agree that SSD is the future, but only for mobile devices, any desktop or server stuff will be using HDD’s for quite long time, its fast, its cheaper, its more data per unit of space, its even more reliable as its write cycles are unlimited and having 2 hdd’s in RAID is much cheaper solution that have SSD… after all.. cloud’s run on HDD’s in RAID 🙂
Btw. SMART data for the fallen HDD would be nice to see…
I think I have been down with the notion of entrusting my data to third parties. To me it a hit and miss kinda situation, there’s no 100% perfect solution. If you think about it, we have entrusted our data to third party in real life too. So I have no problem to trust one more third party. *LOL*
I think I can remove my optical drive from my MacBook and install another drive for RAID. I’ll definitely will do that. The easiest solution come at the cost of my battery life hahaha.
How do you dig the SMART data?
http://www.ehow.com/how_2091894_check-macs-smart-status.html
looks like MAC doesnt provide any verbosity,
on windows i ve used Everest utility, among other info’s and bench it can show full smart
for Linux its smartctl utility (package smartmontools)
example of full report:
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always – 0
2 Throughput_Performance 0x0026 252 252 000 Old_age Always – 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0023 093 093 025 Pre-fail Always – 2290
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 827
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 252 252 010 Pre-fail Always – 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 252 252 051 Old_age Always – 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0024 252 252 015 Old_age Offline – 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 15654
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 252 252 051 Old_age Always – 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 13
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 309
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 344
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0022 252 252 000 Old_age Always – 0
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0002 061 051 000 Old_age Always – 39 (Min/Max 16/49)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 0
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 252 252 000 Old_age Always – 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 252 252 000 Old_age Always – 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 252 252 000 Old_age Offline – 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0036 200 200 000 Old_age Always – 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x002a 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 261
223 Load_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 13
225 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 1416
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged