Every time I get on a plane bad things happen.
Not ’sweating guy clutching briefcase and Koran’ bad but ‘opening bag to find everything broken’ bad. My life and work require I travel with a lot of gear and in the past two years I’ve experienced complete data loss and every permutation of annoying technical SNAFU bad luck, poor planning and imperfect foresight can throw up. For your benefit here’s what I’ve learned from failed to do the following:
Back-up before you leave. Assume your computer won’t survive the flight. Make sure that you leave a complete copy of your data and applications at ‘home’ so you can re-populate your bought-with-insurance replacement PC with genius.
Create a documents folder. Arrange your files so they all fall within a single master folder. You can then copy that onto a CD/DVD or USB drive whenever you need to without missing anything important. Cultivate this tick so that even if you lose your programs, you don’t lose your data.
Back-up your documents. In addition to the back-up you leave at home copy your documents folder twice. Once onto a piece of media you can leave behind in case your hard-drive back-up fails when you need it, and once to carry with you in case you lose data while on the road. This is paranoid and wise.
Get a mobile hard drive. Desktop drives are cheap and fast but their size makes them difficult to protect. With a mobile drive in your carry-on luggage you avoid placing your data in the hands of ground-crew. Why do you need an external drive as well as your laptop? So you can back-up on the road. If you are working as you travel you need to assume that on your homebound journey your computer will die before you get back. Your back-ups will save you. Your smugness will annoy all around you.
Don’t trust the Transport Security Agency. TSA also stands for ‘Tearing Shit Apart’ and I don’t believe that’s a coincidence. Every time I’ve found a ‘This bag was opened…’ note in my checked bags I’ve had to deal with gear that didn’t work. Xenu knows how they ‘check’ electronic equipment but my guess is they throw it in a tank of water and anything that floats is considered evil and destroyed. Checking gear – even when packed in flight-cases – is like going at it with a hammer. Avoid.
All this seems obvious and reads like overkill but if it was either I wouldn’t have just lost all my files with names past ‘M’ in the alphabet this week. Laugh it up you bastards and happy traveling.
Popularity: 33% [?]
I second, third, and fourth everything you’ve said. My easy-to-remember slogan – “If you care about it, put it in your carryon.”
If you’re in the USA, you can get a 1GIG jump drive for under $100 at Sam’s Club – ridiculously cheap and easy!
Snakes on a plane.
I’m a musician by trade and after ‘99 they stopped letting us carry guitars in hard cases onto planes. Month before last I had to fly across country to record, and I had no choice but to check my good guitar – unreplaceable, un-backupable. I bought a flight case that fits around the outer hardshell case and it came out ok, but man was I nedrvous.
Isabella – thanks for plugging my club. I’m not only the owner. I’m a member.
Tony – We’ve got to get the motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!
John – Too painful to contemplate. At least a guitar’s obviously fragile. My aluminium drives look way tougher than they are which I think is part of the problem…
I don’t know if you’re a mac guy or not, Sam. But if so I use a nifty program called Chronsync to keep my laptop documents folder in-sync with my desktop documents folder. Actually it isn’t my docs folder, I keep a Projects folder within my documents folder, and I only keep my Projects synced.
Takes a small bit to get used to but it is soooo worth it.
Also, screw your club Sam. Get an iPod shuffle 1gig for a hundred bucks. Might as well be able to listen to music with the rest of the space you don’t use.
And finally, all those hard drives you buy usually come with some sort of backup utility. Use it.
Good post.