Articles by Xeni Jardin

Over the weekend, I did something really stupid during a data migration and believed I'd effectively lost/destroyed an important and irreplaceable chunk of my mail archives. I sweated, I cried, I rended garments, I banged my head against hard things, I couldn't eat or sleep, and I was kind of an asshole to people I love.

Today, on the recommendation of my friend Christian Boyce, I stumbled in to the CompuTech Mac and PC support shop in Los Angeles. The short version of the rest of my tale: they resolved the issue fast, reunited me with my data, and were absolute gentlemen. The joint is run by Boing Boing readers, and they could not have been more knowledgeable, effective, and nice. They also advised me on a better backup routine (short version: don't trust the cloud alone—back up to multiple physical disks on and offsite *PLUS* the cloud, and use an app like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to create a bootable clone).

I should note that these guys aren't a data recovery shop per se, they do a broad range of hardware and software/OS support stuff for PC and Mac (perhaps Linux too, though I did not ask). This blog post is not an ad, and this is not payback, this is me sharing gratitude for a great business in the town where I live, run by awesome people.

As a Twitter follower just observed, "getting a new lease on data's life is like the ending to A Christmas Carol. 'I swear, from now on, I'll back up EVERY DAY!" FSM bless us, every one. The most wonderful feeling in the world: believing you've suffered a catastrophic data loss, then getting the data back. And that is my excuse for the photograph which accompanies this blog post.

CompuTech (ask for Josh Yellin or Matthew LaForest, and send them my best). They're also on Twitter.

* A footnote: another pal recommended MailSteward as a good helper app, and I'll be trying that now.