Well I got my new refurbed disk. Nothing special…music is copying to it right now.
I’ve been backed up (heh) with other work though and the severe lack of space here has
prevented me from doing as much as I want to without tripping over a guitar or two.
Thinking about my update to the intensions site and wondering how I can get stuff going
there soon without too much trouble. I use a cool tool called Pageot which helps the QT
labor go quickly. I’m trying to automate this and add it to my podcast site for folks who don’t have rss feeds which work as well as Apple’s Safari and iTunes work together.
Still, RSS stuff is quite mysterious to me. Atom feeds,XML,PHP etc. these things are
all related but seemingly there’s a bit of Babylon going on in how these things should work.
I find I am thinking up all the right questions and google yields much of the same questions I have about trying to get these things to work right. So at least I’m on the right track. I’m going to try to keep writing about this stuff as learn about it. Maybe it will help someone else working on their sites.
That’s all fer now…

Specifically-the UPS man. With my replacement -uh, refurbished, Seagate Drive- of Comparable size and speed. I had to
invoke the shipment 5 days after the box was received. Apparently, Receiving folks in McAllen Texas (where you have to send the drive) don’t talk to Seagate Customer Service which I am assuming is in Asia . I called Seagate CS and reported that my box was received on 12th of January (6 days? via usps with confirmation) and it took 24 hours for them to actually acknowledge this – so I think it’s on its way.

Here’s the rub-As soon as I had problems with the drive, I called Seagte and set up the RMA. I had the drive checked out at a (cheap) recovery service who informed me there was nothing they could do to fix this drive. So I had them ship the drive to me, and I subsequently forwarded it to Seagate with their RMA return label as was sent to me via Email.This whole ordeal takes too long to get a WARRANTY replacement on a BRAND NEW (mfg June 2005) drive. Seagate needs a cheaper data reccovery service for these kind or problems. Oh- they have one alright but it’s at least [500$](http://www.seagate.com/support/service/drs/pricing.html) to get data any data off of it. Personally,I feel they should at least offer to cover the recovery in these cases of HARDWARE failure (this wasn’t data corruption, or spindle malfunction, the problem was the mag disk inside-my recovery guy said I could sent the drive to DriveSavers and there’s a 60% chance they could get data off of it) -I mean, they do have the facility to offer this for their own branded drives. Of course, since they just sucked up [Maxtor ](http://www.seagatemaxtor.com)
so we’ll have to see if Maxtor just got better or Seagate just got worse. On a side note, I can’t bring myself to purchase
Maxtor or Western Digital Hard Drives since I’ve seen SO MANY failures right out of the box. This is much different than
the problems with Drive folks like Lacie or ADS who simply have crappy firewire busses.(-that’s another story!)

So now I’m skeptical of Seagate and I’m looking forward to the prices of an SSHDD to drop from a vendor like [Memtech](http://www.memtech.com) so we can all have drives with no moving parts.

Any IT person worth their bits will always respond to “Do I need a backup?” with hearty “Yes, indeedy do”.
If you are doing anything even remotely worth saving indefinitely, back it up. Do it twice, if you can.
I often backup my customers stuff on to a disk for “just in case” scenarios – even when they tell me they have backups.
Or If I’m stuffing a new hard disk into their workstation, I’ll dupe the old files onto the new one.
It is very likely a person who tells you they have everything backed up is hiding the truth, so I suggest to watch them do one,
if the opportunity arises. I’ve seen people back up alises but not the folders, or back up way too much stuff than is
neccessary. Also, one way to tell if your disk is failing is to do a massive write job to some other harddrive.

I have most of my backups on hardrives and cds, much of it is duplicated across these things so rebuilding the files back is a big
painful ordeal. But better to have dupes than to have NADA.

As far as my dead Seagate is concerned, my drive guy say it is unrecoverable unless I send it to DriveSavers and shell out an amount between
500 and 1200 dollars. I was trying to recover some customer files, most of my stuff was backed up save for a temporary image of a laptop
which wasn’t a tragic thing. The crash wasn’t really a head crash, but a disk malfunction physically obliterating the drive directory (so you could
see the bus the drive was on-but no drive) I do a lot of Disk Recovery and have been often successful with software and
dieing drive syndrome but this is the first time a new working drive has died so completely. I will bug Seagate about this stupid issue
when I send it back for replacement. A horrible horrible experience. Folks- Back it up.