Why Hardware Sucks and Backups and Clouds Matter

It was only about 7 months ago that I wrote Google Docs vs. the Hassle of Microsoft Office and Friends in which I said: Last week I lost a ton of productivity because the hard disk on my laptop failed. There's a long story behind this. The short version is that I knew it was failing for a few weeks and, yes, I had backups. The IT folks got me a new notebook (an HP nc6400 which isn't bad, really) and I've spent quite a bit of time getting my stuff running again. Would you believe that I'm on the verge of repeating this already? Here's the support ticket I just filed with our IT group at work: Subject: My nc6440 notebook seems to have a failing hard disk or controller In the last week, my laptop has become flakey. I've been seeing an increasing number of these errors in my event log: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/pics/laptop-disk-errors.png And yesterday I could swear I heard it making the dreaded "clicking" noise that's often a sign of imminent death. This machine has been quite stable since the day I got it, but it managed to bluescreen for the first time yesterday and it has locked up hard on me twice so far today. Would it be possible to replace the disk, cloning the existing one in the process? Bonus points if the new one is bigger. :-) *sigh* Amusingly, one of the poster children for cloud computing is Amazon.com. And their S3 service had a major outage today . So there's that. Anyway, this is a good reminder to write about my backup strategy soon. I'll likely be putting to good use... again. ( comments )