Is your hard drive safe from your cat?
It’s a Tuesday, close to midnight. I’ve just gotten back from Africa and the animals have patiently waited their turn for face time, making way for the kids to get their snuggles in first. I sit at the computer, downloading the first of several memory cards of priceless photos, the documentation of the punda trip of a lifetime.
Apollo is on my lap, drooling. I nudge him aside to wipe my hand. He waits a minute, then comes back.
“Apollo, stop,” I say.
He bites my finger, a love nibble that leaves a bruise. I detach him with a little more force, trailing a gibbet of spittle as he indignantly scurries to the side. He regards me coolly for a minute, then launches himself onto the keyboard. TAKE THAT, he says, staring me in the eyes in challenge.
My computer, already groaning under the weight of too many raw files and not enough memory, screeches in protest as his kitty butt simultaneously inputs commands to open fifty files, start a video, move twenty pictures to the “Surf Dog 2010″ folder, and “delete all.”
I scream “No! NOOO!” as I look in horror at the screen. The computer freezes. I have no idea how many commands went through courtesy of his gluteus before the whole system collapsed. I wait an interminable two minutes to reboot, my life- and his- flashing before my eyes as I silently pray he didn’t delete any pictures I already removed from the flash card.
In my case, I got lucky. The computer froze before anything was permanently erased. But I’ve been on the other side, and lots of you have too. I know people, and I mean really smart, computer savvy people, who have wound up in tears realizing they or their cat have inadvertently lost priceless pictures, videos of first days of kindergarten, and other irreplaceable memories because they just hadn’t gotten around to backing up their data. And poof, then it’s too late.
Cats are drawn to computers like moths to a flame. Perhaps they are just trying to admire themselves or make sure they, too, are featured on YouTube. I get it. Cats are all over the internet.
Small comfort when they cause a minor nuclear meltdown in your hard drive. And of course, they couldn’t care less.
If you haven’t gotten a chance to establish a backup system yet, SurDoc.com is offering free 30 GB of storage using the coupon code CATPROOF. It’s an online service, so if you’re like me and using external hard drives it can be nice to have your bases covered in multiple ways. I say this as someone who has fried a Drobo. It wasn’t pretty.
Anyone have any dramatic tales of woe and loss with computer meltdowns? And was the cat to blame?
