It’s getting ridiculous, the amount of tech issues I’ve had lately. I know some of my family members consider me to be a very “lucky” person. Well, I can assure you, there are a few areas where that luck averages out.

Since starting the new business, I’ve gotten more serious about backing up data, and I bought a 1 TB external hard drive expressly for that purpose. I think that’s where it all started…

1. The external HD, supposedly pre-formatted as FAT32 so that both PCs and Macs can use it, didn’t come formatted as FAT32. I discovered this only after wasting several hours copying PC files to it. So then I had to reformat it in FAT32 and start all over again.

2. Then new external HD, after working fine for several months, stopped allowing Macs to write to it. (I still don’t know why.)

3. I upgraded my Mac’s OS to Snow Leopard recently, and backed up all my important business files before doing so. Since I couldn’t write to the external HD, I burned a DVD. The content all just fit. This was late August.

4. I buy an iPhone 3GS off a friend. After 2 weeks, the home button goes crazy and the thing is unusable. Fortunately my old phone still works fine. The iPhone needs to be repaired before I can use it again.

5. While meeting with a client, my computer started making funny noises. It was the HD totally failing.

6. I took my dead HD in for data recovery, since I had over a month of files not backed up. I have a lot of my important files hosted on the web, but not all, so I wanted to recover that data. It turns out a lot of the tracks were bad, and so some data was lost. Among this lost data was the index, meaning the original directory structure, filenames, and modified dates were all lost. The data wasn’t totally unusable, though; I could use a search tool to find important data in this mess of files.

7. The data recovery guy tells me he can’t write to my external HD. There’s something wrong with it. I need to get about 100 gigs of data from the guy, but don’t have a way to get it. I decide to get the new HD installed on my Mac, and then he can copy directly to that. Yesterday after getting the Mac back with the new HD, I spent several hours installing all the software I wanted and configuring the system.

8. I take the Mac into the data recovery guy. The plan is to remove the HD, connect it to his PC, copy all the data over, and connect it back. Seems like a simple flawless plan, only after reconnecting the HD back to my Mac, the Mac will no longer recognize the HD, and so won’t turn on. GREAT. I get him to burn all the most important filetypes to DVD, and to just forget about the rest.

9. I take my Mac back to the place that installed the new HD, and they take a look. They tell me the HD has been partitioned and ask why I did that. What?! Partitioned? I take a look. It does indeed have some partitions showing up. They tell me the only way to make sure the system is stable and OK again is to wipe everything again and reinstall Mac OS.

Now I’m at home, reinstalling software again, and copying back the files I need again. I’ve wasted almost 2 days of my vacation on this problem so far. Hopefully it’s over…