So this morning I had a grand plans to get lots of writing done, drink tea, and recover from my cold. I sat down at the iMac and worked for about 30 minutes when, while I was away from my desk, everything froze. The iMac was locked up and not going anywhere so I rebooted and was greeted by this friendly icon.

Suddenly my Mac wasn’t sure what happened to the start-up volume. That’s bad. After trying a few times, and getting nowhere, I plugged in yesterday’s automated SuperDuper backup and rebooted from it (holding down the ‘C’ key). Everything booted fine from the clone. I then opened disk utility and discovered my internal disc was gone. Just like that. Working one moment, dead the next. Because I am nutty about backing up, this drive failure was a non-event for me. I took the iMac into the Apple Store and it will have a new drive in a few days. There are no lost pictures or destroyed family video. In fact, there aren’t even any lost pointless, yammering, text files. My latest backup was just an hour before the drive cooked itself.

So my question to you is: If your drive failed right now, how would you feel about it?

Blown up hard drive picture courtesy of PC Tech Notes.