Click. Click. Click. Click. This sound can be a good thing. When it comes from a grandfather clock. And a fucking bad thing, at least if it comes from your hard drive. Thirty minutes past twelve yesterday afternoon, the 30GB IBM Travelstar in my laptop started to make sounds like these.

Around nine hours later it died a terrible death with an orgasm of rattling sound. 30GB and about 4 years worth of e-mail, pictures, mp3s, letters, comic strips and other thing are now gone, lost forever.

Or maybe not. Thanks to backups.

I think I’ve got most of the critical stuff, like personal e-mails and pictures because I backed up a lot of stuff when I was about to install Service Pack 2. The backups are a bit old, but it’s not all lost. The only thing I know I don’t have backups of is Outlook data, which is not that much of a crisis, since I’ve got most of my contacts and calendar synched with my mobile phone. I lost all my e-mails from work, but I’ll survive.

Dell is shipping a new hard drive for free, but they didn’t have any 30GB 4200RPM drives in stock, so they’re sending me a new 40GB 5400RPM drive instead. Could be worse. Only problem is that it could take a while before the drive arrives, which means I have to write new entries either at work or on the crappy living room computer.

Lesson learned: Backup before your hard drive starts making clicking noises. When it does, your on your merry way to losing whatever data is on the drive.

Today I ate a damn expensive Christmas dinner with Ola, Hege, Terje and Inger. Once again, I’m the fifth wheel, but once again it didn’t matter. Good friends, good times.