This post is going to prove just how geeky my husband and I really are…but whatever. This little tidbit seriously saved my sanity.

If you’ve read NOH for a while, you know I highly value backups and I use an automatic backup service for my laptop, which I love. A couple of years ago, Stefan and I set up a home network with the use of Windows Home Server. When it worked, it was awesome. We could have one computer running all the time that held all of our files that we worked on together or needed to access…and we didn’t have to worry quite so much about one computer failing. Until the server computer began to show us the blue screen of death.

Gotta love Microsoft. But I’m still not ready to fully jump to Mac either.

At any rate, we got a couple of external hard drives, which was about the time that the prices on them started to plummet. Gotta love technology. And things were going pretty well with them for about 2 years (ya know, right outside the warranty window when electronics are programmed to self destruct). And then they just stopped powering up. These were the older ones that actually had their own power plug; not the newer ones that just power up over the USB (which so far have been far more reliable).

And so it was back to square one as far as the redundant backups goes.

Unfortunately, one of these now dead external hard drives was what I had (stupidly) been using as a second backup to my computer, as well as an overflow since I was starting to fill up my laptop hard drive with all the thousands of photos I’ve taken in the last couple years and some of my other business-related files. And so I realized that I was now at a serious loss without this hard drive.

So I tried everything, from beating on it to putting it in the freezer (that’s actually something people recommend for a drive that is failing because sometimes it will actually bring it back long enough to get everything off) and I tried a few other things as well. But nothing worked. It seemed all was doomed.

And then I read some tiny thread online in a tucked away forum that one could actually take the hard drive out of the external case and put it inside your computer as a slave drive. Now seriously. this is a simple idea and I really wish I’d heard it a long time ago. But I kinda had my doubts. It just seemed to easy.

If it had been up to me to do this, She Who Kills Electronics, the thing still wouldn’t work. But thankfully, my wonderful husband rocks with geeky stuff like that and he just opened everything up, plugged it in and off we went. And you know what…it works perfectly. As if the thing has always been inside that computer working it’s butt off.

The even more fabulous thing is that our home network (sans server) is sharing that drive across all our computers…which is even more helpful than when it was portable.

So if I haven’t bored you yet with the geek stuff, just keep in mind that in case you have a portable hard drive that tries to die on you, as long as you haven’t dropped it or killed the drive itself, it’s entirely likely that you can give it a new life inside your own computer.

Do you play nicely with computers? 😉

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