Web Apps to the Rescue

• Posted by Greg Arnette on March 3rd, 2007 filed in Web 2.0, Off Topic, Pontificate

Using web apps “saved my bacon” - here’s my tale of woe, which was made much less horrendous because I didn’t lose any data from a recent disk failure.

I awoke Friday to find my six month old Macbook dead from it’s overnight who-knows-what REM sleep activities.

I self-diagnosed the problem to be Total Hard Drive Failure (THDF). The tell-tale rhythmic click…click…click from the drive bay and the fact the disk utilities on the OS recovery DVD couldn’t even see the drive pretty much confirmed my diagnosis.

It was now time to call Apple Care to arrange repair, and figure out how to survive without my primary computer. I figured I could get by with a spare Windows laptop and my hosted productivity apps.

Apple Care estimated two to three weeks turn-around. Ouch - That wasn’t going to work for me, since I had important Keynote presentations to give in just a few days. I had to be more self-sufficient to get back up and running. So I located a replacement drive at an out-of-the-way Mac reseller in Falmouth, MA (100 miles round-trip) (paid retail for a 160Gb drive - that hurts) and am now installing the OS from the DVD and pray that my backup from a few days ago has most/all of my data. I’m most concerned about my presentation files.

Over the past year I have been using web apps exclusively for email, calendaring, word processing, project management, and spreadsheets. My presentations are the only work product not “in the cloud.”

As I write this I am selectively recovering files from a backup and starting to piece together my system so I can do development work. The total hard drive failure could have been a really big problem - web apps allowed my virtual team and I to keep on working through my local outage. So the drive failure still robbed me of about a day of productivity, but I didn’t lose any valuable data.

Lessons learned: spread data assets over multiple physical devices and areas, and use a disk image system instead of full/incremental backups to recover from system failure.