When you have responsibility for advertising, marketing, public relations, graphic design, and website files for hundreds of clients within your system, computer crashes 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 dormant 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 any time. This means that I must maintain a complete file of work done that I can access at all times to review, update, reference or adapt to new applications as requested.

This working library 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; Quark’s extensive files of final text, photos, and illustrations composed with sophisticated and meticulous design, which no doubt also required many, many hours of setup, not to mention customer reviews and final revisions; extremely complicated Dreamweaver website files; equally complicated Flash files for impressive website animations; flawlessly produced vector files of artwork created in Adobe Illustrator; a multitude of various dropdown menus for website use built in Fireworks; hundreds of PDF files created with Adobe Acrobat Distiller for high-quality results; and a potpourri of other works using music, film, video, and other miscellaneous files.

Since thirty-five years is a long time, and he has spanned several technological (and not so technological) 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 deprecated or no longer in production. Having learned years ago that trying to store and work on files on the same hard drive with limited space can lead to problems, I’ve resorted to always having one or two external hard drives as extensions to my computer system, so I always have enough open disk space 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 went up dramatically, while ironically the costs didn’t.

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 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM (memory), and an internal hard drive with 232.89GB of storage capacity. I purchased this system several years ago, have used it for nearly eighteen hours or more every day, and have loved every minute of it, especially the gorgeous monitor. I intend to update 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 update will require me to also update all of the above mentioned software programs that I use, which will mean a Nice investment, considerable, but necessary.

Until just about two weeks ago, I had two external hard drives connected to this system: a full-on Firewire that I stopped using daily because it made a strange noise and I thought I should keep what was left; and a Western Digital “My Book”, which has roughly the same storage capacity as my internal hard drive (approx. 232GB). 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 displayed some disturbing symptoms over the last six months that I could usually dismiss or deny. These included taking a long time to mount or failing to mount on 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 were reported to be free of issues, something I seriously doubted. I then copied some of the files I needed most frequently to my mostly empty internal hard drive and rebooted my system without turning on the MyBook. I was able to work and save files without glitches. That seemed to confirm to me that MyBook was to blame. But why?

I bought a new external hard drive online and from reading and researching the problem I learned that external hard drives don’t like to be put to sleep and then suddenly woken up only to suddenly perform some immediate function. As I tend to be an impatient person driven by 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 working life. Checking my system preferences in 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 throughout the day. Probably as the MyBook has gotten older and slower (as we all do as we get older), it just can’t keep up with the pace I’m trying to put it at. Maybe it’s also a function of the amount of data on the drive, it just needs more time to do everything, especially get up and running.

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 the available RAM, albeit a generous amount. My husband chimed in with the idea that maybe he hadn’t allocated my memory correctly. That sounds like a distant bell in my mind…a very distant bell. I thought back to the days when I allocated memory for each of my programs, dividing up 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 topic on Google, I quickly discovered that those days were 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 attached 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 outdated and possibly overloaded with data, I decided to invest in a new external hard drive with the goal of placing all my most essential files as an additional 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. After $50 discounts and free shipping, 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, he recommends always booting the hard drive before turning on the computer and always unmounting before turning off the computer to avoid any damage or data loss. What no one ever seems to mention is that when the power goes out unexpectedly like it happens every time the wind is blowing the wrong way where I live, the computer shuts down abruptly, and no hard drives are properly unmounted in the process. So far the new Fantom unit 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 have recently learned that the best way to deal with any negative results is to completely disconnect the MyBook from its power source and let it self-clear for about a breather. 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 external hard drives attached, as a similar “cleanup” interlude after a power outage or any crash incident of any kind, the whole system runs better afterwards. .

Simply using common sense has helped me resolve this issue, 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 attached, 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 them to the new hard drive while I sleep for at night so as not to bother the system with multitasking demands. Although the MyBook continued to misbehave periodically when asked 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 the MyBook on 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 that 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 led me to focus on this problem, the complete loss of an entire MyBook folder with some extremely important data that I had been working on when my attempt to save a simple file caused a recent system crash. It has been a valuable lesson in confronting what is important when running a business: you can never have enough reliable backup systems!