When you have responsibility for advertising, marketing, public relations, graphic design, and website files for hundreds of clients within your system, computer failures that risk potential data loss can be a major reason to panic. To do?

I have been in the marketing business for over thirty-five years. I have active clients whose work I need to address frequently. I also have inactive clients that pop up unpredictably from time to time and also need immediate attention.

Regardless of who asks, I need to be ready, willing and able to do what is needed at a moment’s notice. This means that I must maintain a complete archive of the work done that I can access at all times to review, update, reference or adapt to new applications as requested.

This library of work includes huge, high-resolution Photoshop files that may have had hours, days, or weeks of work put into them to enhance the original images in some way; extensive Quark files of final text, photos, and illustrations composed with sophisticated and meticulous design, which also undoubtedly required many, many hours of setup, not to mention customer reviews and final revisions; extremely complicated Dreamweaver website files; equally complicated Flash files for stunning website animations; impeccably produced vector files of artwork created in Adobe Illustrator; a multitude of various dropdown menus for website use created in Fireworks; hundreds of PDF files created with Adobe Acrobat Distiller for high-quality results; and a potpourri of other works using music, movies, videos, and other miscellaneous files.

Since thirty-five years is a long time, and you’ve spanned several technological (and not-so-tech) eras in the process, this work is in a variety of formats, including scans of older work as well as actual digital files. of native programs, some of which are now obsolete or no longer produced. Having learned years ago that trying to store and work on files on the same hard drive with limited space can cause problems, I have resorted to always having one or two external hard drives as extensions of my computer system so that I always have plenty of open space on my computer. disc for digital “percolation”, for lack of a better term.

My external hard drives include firewire and USB data transfer systems, with firewire being the fastest and most expensive version. And, unsurprisingly, every time I needed a new external drive, the capacities increased dramatically while, ironically, the costs did not.

Over the years, I’ve owned many different Macintosh computers, usually the most expensive, fastest, and most glorious versions available. But I’m currently working on a more conservatively priced iMac running OS X 10.4.11, with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of RAM (memory), and an internal hard drive with 232.89 GB of storage capacity. I bought this system several years ago, have used it for almost eighteen hours or more every day and have loved every minute of it, especially the gorgeous monitor. I intend to upgrade my entire system probably later this year when the new OS X operating system is released. I say this with the full knowledge that such an upgrade will require me to also upgrade all of the aforementioned software programs that I use, which will entail a nice investment, considerable, but necessary.

Until just a couple of weeks ago, I had two external hard drives connected to this system: a full-on Firewire that I stopped using every day because it was making a weird noise and I thought I should keep what was left; and a “My Book” from Western Digital, which has about the same storage capacity as my internal hard drive (about 232 GB). After about two years, I have only used about half of its available space. So when my system started crashing repeatedly one recent afternoon, I was very concerned because I didn’t know what was causing the problem.

I was immediately suspicious of “My Book” because it had exhibited some disturbing symptoms over the past six months that I could usually dismiss or deny. These included taking a long time to mount or failing to mount to the desktop, without obvious provocation. However, with computer reboots, the drive would mount and I chose not to dwell on the incident.

When discussing the failures with my husband, who is a retired IBM technician and engineering consultant, he immediately asked me what I had been doing just before the failure. I said that he was trying to save my work in any of several programs including Quark, Photoshop and others. He also felt that MyBook was to blame because that was the purpose of my save data. I said that he hadn’t even gotten to the point where he had told it. where to save the data, so I still had my doubts that that was the problem.

I decided to do some testing in an effort to eliminate some possibilities. I ran a Disk Utility diagnostic test on both the internal and MyBook hard drives and both reported no issues, something I seriously doubted. I then copied some of my most frequently needed files to my mostly empty internal hard drive and rebooted my system without powering on the MyBook. I was able to work and save files without fail. That seemed to confirm to me that MyBook was to blame. But why?

I bought a new external hard drive online and through reading and researching the issue, I learned that external hard drives don’t like to be put to sleep and then rudely woken up to suddenly perform some immediate function. Since I tend to be an impatient person driven by a lack of time in the day and too much to do in the time I have available, I realized that this scenario was a common phenomenon in my work life. Checking my system preferences under Power Saver, I noticed that my system was set to sleep if idle for more than 15 minutes (the default setting), which happens quite often when the phone rings or I get up to attend to something. other activity. periodically during the day. Probably, as the MyBook has gotten older and slower (as we all do as we age), it just can’t keep up with the pace I’m trying to push it through. Maybe it’s also a function of the amount of data on the drive, it just needs more time to do everything, especially wake up and work.

Also, I read that you may be asking too much of a multitasking computer system with many programs open at the same time, all of which are using available RAM, albeit a generous amount. My husband chimed in with the idea that maybe he hadn’t mapped my memory correctly. That sounds like a distant bell in my mind…a very distant bell. I remembered the days when I allocated memory for each of my programs, dividing my available RAM according to what made sense: more for Photoshop, less for Quark, for example. I realized that I had not done that task in many years. But researching the subject on Google, I quickly discovered that those days are long over with the advent of OS X, which automatically allocates RAM as needed. It is not surprising!

So I decided to reboot my system with My Book connected and try to limit my program usage to one at a time and set the sleep mode to “never” to allow it to go to sleep. That seemed to be the magic wand. However, knowing that MyBook was becoming obsolete and possibly overloaded with data, I decided to invest in a new external hard drive with the goal of putting all my most essential files on it as an extra backup.

At Mac Mall, I found a very reasonable 1TB Fantom GreenDrive eSATA/USB 2.0 external hard drive with the help of a customer service representative that was compatible with Windows and OS X 10.4 or later for approx. $50 after discounts and free shipping, which I couldn’t resist. Following the instructions, I installed it on my USB hub and formatted the new hard drive for use with OS X.

As with MyBook, it is recommended to always initialize the hard drive before turning on the computer and to always unmount before turning off the computer to avoid any data damage or loss. What no one ever seems to mention is that when the power goes out unexpectedly like it does every time the wind blows away from where I live, the computer abruptly shuts down and no hard drives are properly unmounted in the process. So far, the new Fantom drive seems to ignore such events and mounts immediately with no apparent repercussions.

However, from past experience, I know that the MyBook does not react favorably to such incidents and I recently learned that the best way to deal with any negative outcome is to completely disconnect the MyBook from its power source and let it clear itself for a breather or so. five minutes before plugging it back in while the computer is off. I also find that if I reboot my computer system once and shut it down between boots with the external hard drives attached, as a similar “cleanup” interlude after a power outage or any crash incident of any kind, the entire system runs better. subsequently.

The simple act of using common sense has helped me to solve this problem, find a solution and work to rectify my situation with the team I have to work with. I booted my system with MyBook and Fantom connected, set sleep mode to “never”, waited a long time for MyBook to mount, and then judiciously dragged many of my files from the old hard drive to copy to the new hard drive while I sleep at night. night so as not to bother the system with multitasking demands. While the MyBook continued to misbehave periodically when prompted to unmount it after a long session, which again crashed the entire system, I was able to move all my important files to the new drive and now I don’t even need to turn on the MyBook anymore . I can now successfully work on the Fantom or my internal hard drive with multiple programs open simultaneously without worrying about crashes, as long as I keep my sleep mode set to “never”. When I plan to be away from the computer for an extended period of time, I unmount the Fantom and turn it off, restore the default sleep settings, and walk away knowing my system will be able to wake up when I return without worrying about crashes and date loss. What a relief!

Of course, the motivating factor that finally got me focused on this problem, the total loss of an entire MyBook folder with some extremely important data I had been working on when my attempt to save a simple file caused a recent system crash. , has been a valuable lesson in confronting what is important when running a business: you can never have enough reliable backup systems!