Last night, my external HD, the "work" drive, fell over.
There was a bit of thunder coming, see, and I had shut down the system and I unplugged the HD, thinking it was resting comfortably on top of my computer case. Nope. Freed from its moorings, it went right the hell over and behind the desk. So I took everything apart and got back behind the desk and got the stupid thing and it seems to be fine but I just don't trust anything these days. I'd been thinking of getting another backup drive anyway; this just made it imperative.
So I went to Best Buy this morning. They have a Western Digital 500 GB MyBook, Home Edition, on sale for $129.99. (The one they're hawking in the ads, the Essential Edition, is $159.99 but has a green box rather than blue. No, really. That's it.) Got it home, ascertained I'd have to format it because it's in FAT32 and XP is much happier with NTFS. I looked at the included software, decided I likely didn't want it, but the drive utility had a "Copy Application" function which would "backup the valuable software on this drive". I thought, sure. I'm a sucker for backing up software.
I'm a sucker, all right. Fucking thing installed all of it. No option to cancel.
So I spent fifteen minutes cleaning my system of its new rude friends, and now I'm nuking the shit out of the drive (their online help says to select Quick Format, which is insane, I'm going from FAT32 to NTFS) and then I'm going to send Western Digital a nasty letter and maybe a dictionary so they learn the difference between "backup" and "install".
And how's your computer doing?
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madfilkentist is trying to fund a book called Files That Last, evangelizing and explaining digital preservation to a wide range of computer users. Thing is, it's only got about 8 hours left. If you like the idea, won't you help?
