The tape drive I purchased back in 2001 finally came in handy today. I was able to restore my important data (code, documents, etc) from 10 days ago (would have been more recent if I had seen the drive acting flaky a week earlier) and photos from a bit further back. Luckily I have many of the missing photos still on the hard drives of my laptop and desktop machines. So, all in all, I really only lost a lot of music I spent a few days ripping. Whew, what a relief.
At the time I purchased the tape drive, it was around $300 and I questioned the necessity of the device – that was a pretty expensive purchase for me at the time, being a student and all. Today, without it, I would have been willing to pay a LOT more than $300 to get my photos and data back.
Over the next few weeks I plan on getting a better backup solution in place. I was extremely lucky this time, as I became lazy and my backup machine offline for a few months. It was less than a couple weeks ago that I started getting it back online and performing backups. I NEVER want to experience that aweful feeling ever again.
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