freezing a hard drive

The previous post didn't actually go the way I expected - I searched for that photo because I was thinking about how relative time is, how it can seem so short and so long simultaneously... and that made me start thinking about the clock from Prague. But when I saw the photo I also saw the skeleton figure, which I had forgotten about... and it sort of shocked me all over again.

Anyway, tonight's post is about something I'm very thankful for. But first you need the back story. Last week I was in the middle of typing on my Mac and all the sudden everything froze. Practically in mid-word. Wouldn't respond to the mouse or keyboard. So I shut it down, waited awhile, and turned it back on... nothing. Wouldn't boot at all. Tried booting from an external hard drive, still nothing. By now I'm getting the idea this isn't going to be easy; something is seriously wrong with the computer. I went in search of paperwork and found it is still covered under AppleCare (whew!). BUT... it's been awhile since I've backed anything up. A long while. And I have lots and lots and lots of photos stored on this machine.

So off to the Apple store I go, and sure enough, the hard drive is not responding. They replace it and last weekend I went to pick it back up. I asked if I could take the old hard drive just on the off chance that I can get something out of it. First they said no, we gave you a new one so we need to keep the old one. I asked if they were just going to throw it away. They said yes, but it might cost you thousands of dollars to get someone to restore it. I said I was going to try myself, and finally they said "OK, here it is."

Now back to the title of this post which involves my freezer. Turns out that if you put a hard drive in the freezer, it *might* fix it long enough for you to copy files off of it. I found this out at work a few years ago when my laptop's hard drive crashed. They put it in the freezer and the next day I was able to copy everything I needed off of it.

So I put my drive in the freezer overnight, and sure enough, when I tried tonight it came up right away. I recovered about half the photos on the drive before it stopped working. So now it's back in the freezer, I'll try the other half tomorrow.

No photo tonight (I'd take one of the drive but it's back in the freezer) but I am very thankful that I've recovered as much as I have of my hard drive. Oh, and by the way, I am now going to leave Time Machine running to keep more regular backups. I've learned my lesson.