It’s the second time I’ve thought of using that title for a post, and the connection between the two thoughts exists on several levels.

The first time was when Ruairi turned six years old last December. This time: well, this time we’re not talking in ages. To my considerable surprise, and largely thanks to Ruairi’s patient influence, we seem to have acquired a sixth family member.

Say hello to Cooper – born February 21, 2009, which makes him a mere nine weeks old by my count.

Cooper’s a kind of ‘doodle mashup. Somewhere between an Australian Shepherd and a Standard Poodle with, we think, a trace of something else stirred in for good luck. He’s also 8% toe-licker, 6% rug-worrier, 4% random sneezer, and at least 82% heart-breaker.

We have a dog. Crikey. We have a dog.

If you’d have asked me last week, I would still have told you, with confidence, that I was a confirmed cat person – yet here I am, falling hard for the finest bag o’ rags scruffy pup in the known universe.

OK, back up. How did we get here?

Cooper is, essentially, a promise kept. We’re all animal lovers, but of all of us, the most utterly devoted to beasts of every variety is certainly Ruairi. He’s been asking for a dog for as long as I can remember, but at least since he was three years old. We promised him long ago he could have a dog when he reached Grade One – once he was in full-time school. For the past few months, the quiet campaign has intensified, and we knew we were going to have to do it soon. Still and all, we kept finding reasons to put off the decision.

Leona and I both grew up around dogs, but it took me a long time to get my head around the idea of raising a pup. Then last weekend, as I walked down the hill into Riverdale Park for one of Charlie’s cross-country practice sessions, it all finally clicked into place. Nothing like a walk in the park to make you realise how a dog could fit into your life.

So – after months and months of research, reading, talking to friends, and observing the hundreds of neighbourhood pooches – we’ve finally done it. Yesterday afternoon we made the long trek out through one of the filthiest storms I’ve ever driven through, to the rural calm of Wallenstein, Ontario and a lovely, clean and happy Mennonite farm to take a look at their latest litter of pups.

Several of our friends scoffed at the thought that we were “just going to look” at the pups. They were all absolutely right, of course, as I guess I knew they were. We were ready. We knew we were ready and so, it would seem, did the wee beastie who rode back with us, snuggled in Leona’s arms.

The first night was pretty rough. Poor Cooper found it hard to adjust after the disorientation of his first car ride, the excitement of his strange new home, the flood of affection from his new family members, and the misery of separation from his siblings.

We’re doing the crate-training thing, which some people will tell you is cruel (often the same people who’ll angrily swat a pup on the nose when it piddles on the carpet). The books and many experts seem to agree it’s one of the best things you can do for a young dog. Try explaining that to a 9-week-old snufflehound, though. Little Coop was not a happy chap last night.

Not wanting to take him from the crate, but also unable to harden my heart entirely to his lonely whimpers, I ended up – soft idiot that I am – grabbing a sleeping bag and bedding down beside him on the hardwood. Somehow, we both survived intact and (barely) rested. At the same time, this doggie Ferberizing seems to have forged an instant bond between us, such that Cooper has hardly left my side all day.

He’s imprinted on me as deeply as I’ve fallen in love with him.

Today has been a whirl of visits from friends, romps in the garden, walkies, walkies, and more walkies. The comical little scruff has settled in beautifully, so far. Who knows what the next years will bring?

Welcome to the family, little Cooper. It’s a joy to have you here.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we named him Cooper for a number of reasons; one being his fuzzy-headed likeness to a certain favourite comic magician of my childhood.

[UPDATE: He slept through the second night without a peep out of him, and then did his business immediately on being taken outside at 6am. I'm inclined to think this was less a miraculous instant housebreaking epiphany and more the result of him being plain tuckered out after all yesterday's excitement, but I'm not complaining. Good boy, Cooper!]

This will be my fourth time speaking or moderating at mesh – Canada’s premier web conference. Four mesh events in four years, and four times they’ve invited me to participate. Seems the organizers like the cut of my “immoderate moderator” jib, which is deeply flattering and rewarding as I always have a lot of fun doing it.

This year, I’m not running a panel on any of the topics with which I’m normally associated. As the title of this post says, I’m cat-herding a group of experienced entrepreneurs as we unwrap the issues surrounding getting a startup company off the ground.

First question: why me? Well, as it happens, I have more experience in this space than might be immediately obvious. Sure, I’ve done PR and marketing consulting for a whole slew of early-stage technology companies in the past 9 years or so. I’ve helped startup clients secure a healthy chunk of “holy grail” media coverage, with a good assortment of Globe, Post, CTV, CBC, CityTV, Global and even TechCrunch, Engadget and ReadWriteWeb hits. But long before moving into the PR agency world I also had my own direct experience of bootstrapping a startup.

It’s a long story, but pretty much the whole reason I’m in Canada today goes back to 1996, when the tiny, struggling software firm my friends and I had started in the UK got bought by a much bigger Canadian systems house, who we’d just beaten in a competitive bid for some juicy NY-based business. I arrived in Toronto in the middle of February, ’96. Worked solid 18 hour days for most of that summer and closed the IPO on November 7th of the same year. Hey – it was the 90s, that’s we rolled back then.

Point is: although the market is very different these days, I think I can go into this panel session with a reasonable idea of some of the hot topics we should be exploring. But I also need your help.

One of the best things about mesh, in my experience, is the way that the discussion extends well beyond the four walls and fixed time slot of any single session. Plus, whether I’m directly involved in a session or just sitting at the back, I love it when the conversation is lively enough to erase the divide between the experts on stage and the people formerly known as the audience.

Vigorous, even heated debate, is a lot more interesting than a lot of polite consensus from a panel of even the smartest speakers – and it gets us a lot closer to understanding key questions if there’s a healthy cloud of discussion before, during and after the focal point of the session.

It’s also safe to assume that not all of the brightest and best minds on any topic will actually be in the room at the time of the panel chat (that’s one of the benefits of live-blogging and tweeting, of course).

So with all that in mind, I thought I’d kick off part of the discussion here and see if we can spill it over into the panel session next Wednesday afternoon. The panel for this slot is a terrific group of smart entrepreneurs: my old friend, Mic Berman (Embarkonit), Carol Leaman, CEO of the excellent PostRank, and Keith McSpurren, Founder & President of CoverItLive.

With the collected decades of experience this trio has to offer, the hard-won scar tissue of their years in the startup trenches, what are some of the questions you’d want me to fire at them? If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur yourself, or thinking the time is right (despite the soggy market) to finally turn your killer idea into your day job: what one thing would you most like to know from people who’ve been there, still doing that?

I’ve got a list of some initial questions worked up (below), but are these good enough to make our panellists earn your attention? Let me know what you think…

1. What are the two most important ingredients for startup success?
2. What is the most common mistake made by entrepreneurs when bootstrapping (and how do you avoid it)?
3. How do you mitigate the risks of a bootstrapped operation in the midst of recession?
4. Would you be utterly insane to launch a new startup right now?
5. Do you think Canada is a better or worse environment for startups than elsewhere?
6. Who do you turn to for your advice, support, and encouragement?
7. What one book should every founder read?
8. What online resource could you – as an entrepreneur – not live without?
9. Who are Canada’s startup heroes (and villains?)
10. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich already (or, if you are, can you lend me a tenner)?

Help us make this panel the most useful session on building a startup you’ll ever attend. What am I missing?

As with so many of my ideas, this could be utterly daft or genuinely interesting (or something in between). We’ll let the crowd decide…

Un-conferences, meetups and camps (BarCamp, DemoCamp, PodCamp, ChangeCamp, etc.) have become the pedestrian norm in geek and social media circles. The once-rebellious ideals of the un-conference set are drowning in the din of 50,000 cheerily whuffie-riddled, corporate sponsored echo chambers. We need to break out of this rut somehow, dammit. I’m calling for a meta-session on the future of (the future of) un-unconferences.

Call it: meta|camp™*

meta|camp will be an entirely new kind of people-formerly-known-as-the-audience collaboration experiment (in contrast to all of those other mass collaboration experiments currently clogging your over-stuffed schmoozing schedule).

Perhaps a little like the original conception of Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, but even more intricately and self-consciously unstructured in falling over itself to be anarchically self-assembling and self-defining.

meta|camp would adamantly not be a series or an annual event – it would, by definition, be a one-off. This does not entirely preclude the possibility of re-runs, but only once we figure out how to add subtitles on top of subtitles to the DVD copy of the proceedings. We’re looking into the possibility of OCR’ing the screencaps.

Ingredients of meta|camp would be as follows:

• Fill a room with conference-goers, geeks, experts, savants, neophytes, dilettantes – oh, and caterers (we need carbs!);
• Get the contributors (not “audience”) to generate the content and direct the narrative arc of the whole session, on the fly (i.e. no sign-up board or pre-baked schedule);
• Use the MIT Media Lab’s backchan.nl to “run” the session on a big screen;
• Contributors post questions and topics in backchan.nl, vote on what the session should be about and ideas worth exploring;
• Second big screen runs live tweet stream and/or group CoverItLive session;
• Brainstorm what’s good and what’s bad about the current conference/unconference/camp/workshop/whatever world, plus ways to make things better;
• There would have to be at least one, preferably several, catalysts (not “moderators”, panelists, speakers, or invigilators – no. The catalysts are just there to help spark discussion, trouble-shoot the tech, make off-colour remarks about the catering. Catalysts help make things happen – they don’t directly do those things and they get out of the way);
• Everyone wears a mic (or no one does). Everyone has access to backchan.nl, etc.;
• We deal with trolls by ignoring them;
• The whole session also gets webcast live and, yes, perhaps even simulcast in Second Life (shoot me now).

What would we talk about? No agenda or set topics, except insofar as we’re there to talk about the future of (the future of) un-unconferences. So I hope we’d get into such things as:

• Live tweeting/live blogging of conferences – useful meta information or distracting annoyance?
• Pulling up a Twitter or IRC backchannel behind the speakers’ heads – same question.
• Moving from monologue to true group dialogue – new ways to break the old moulds.
• If I say the same thing as the last panelist just said, but I just frame it differently, does a tree fall in the forest?
• Bad animations in Powerpoint – should they carry mandatory jail sentences?
• Name badges – we don’t need no steenking badges.

Just think about the hyper-meta-lovely moebian joy of all this. To have a conference session discussing the future of conference sessions that includes a conversation on live-blogging, while some of the discussion participants are live-blogging the actual session.

Then we should have another tier of people (in the room or around the world) live-blogging the aggregated live-blog coverage. And then we feed THAT back into one of the big screens in the room and have the catalysts and contributors talk to it so that others can then comment and live-blog the commenting of the…

Of course, there’s also a very real risk we could spend the whole of meta|camp defining meta|camp (the first rule of meta|camp is…). But – don’t you see? That’s OK too. In fact, that’s almost the entire point.

I am only semi-joking about this, in case you’re wondering. Bonkers though it may seem (even to me) I really would like to stage a meta|camp at some point in the future. Even really well produced un-conferences and camps have their flaws, and I’ve whined about the conventionality (pun intended) in the past.

So let’s really do it! What the heck. Be Judy Garland to my Mickey Rooney (or… no, that’s just wrong). If we can figure out dates and a venue (and caterers, I’m all about the caterers), join me for meta|camp — where we’ll think the unthinkable, question the unquestionable, eff the ineffable and even screw the inscrutable!

[An important and necessary hat tip, btw, to the very wonderful Gary Turner who may have inadvertently seeded this idea when he meta-blogged the live-blogging of the DigitalID conference way back in 2002. You had to be there.]

*Yes, it needs to be uncapitalised. In the 2.0 world, we are all the bastard offspring of e.e. cummings. And, yes, the vertical line is part of the name. It symbolises the inextricable, inexplicable, ineluctability of the meta memetics of meta|camp and I pity the foo’ who thinks otherwise.

Recently, my number of new Twitter followers has been growing at an increasing rate. I’m not sure if this is simply a factor of the exponential growth of Twitter itself, or perhaps something to do with the fact that I’ve been talking about Twitter a lot more in email, phone conversations and at events. Probably some combination of these things.

Interested to see where all these new followers are coming from, I took a quick walk through the last ten days’ worth of new followers, checking out their profiles to see who these people were.

It quickly became clear that I could group all of the last few hundred followers into a set of simple categories, as this chart shows:

You probably think I’m joking. I only wish that I were (OK, well maybe a little – but I’m not exaggerating by much).

Twitter is still extraordinarily useful, vibrant, and interesting. It is, as Joe says, a great town square. But it’s clearly in danger of being overrun by… well… by all of the above. Meh.

I wonder do they sink —
Winter lawns piled
Heavy under hills of snow?
Springing back level, exhaling
When April brings the thaw.

I’ve written about this in the past, but this morning’s short-lived global Google meltdown seems an appropriate time to repeat the thought.

For years now, I’ve been bringing up E.M. Forster’s extraordinary short story “The Machine Stops” in the context of discussions about Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson or any conversation touching on our society’s increasing dependence on, and faith in, technology.

It seems hardly anyone has ever heard of this story. People know Forster, of course, for the obvious novels (Passage to India, Howards End, etc.) and the Merchant-Ivory movies of his work. But he was also an exceptionally gifted short story writer, on a par with O. Henry in his mastery of the concise art.

I first read The Machine Stops as part of a collection of stories that were issued as required reading in my fourth year of secondary school in England. Many years later, I found an online copy to download and re-read on my old Palm Vx. This morning’s events make me want to go back and read it once again.

In the story, Forster paints a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which humanity has become so utterly dependent on technology as to be rendered completely helpless when, as the title suggests, the “Machine” that runs the world and all forms of life support, simply stops working.

Forster’s Machine has grown over time to become so big and complex that no one living person or group is able to fully grok the complex workings of the thing to start fixing it.

It would be wrong to over-dramatise this morning’s very brief Google outage as anything remotely as catastrophic, of course. But for about 20 entertaining minutes there, it seemed like people worldwide had a tiny glimpse into the fearful abyss of a world without Google (and yes, my tongue’s more than a little way into my cheek).

Being deprived of our groupmind, even for such a short time, caused an extraordinary flood of messages on Twitter. The search for Twitter hashtag #googmayharm reached 100 pages of posts (about 1500 individual tweets) in under an hour and fast overtook the Super Bowl as the hottest rising story.

“As technology advances, our relative understanding decreases, and our helplessness and confusion increases,” as that Weinberger bloke once said.

Indeed. The curious thing for me is that I’m left more reassured than worried about all this.

When one key part (in this case Google) completely fails – however briefly – we may have a moment of panic, but we quickly learn to route around the damage. There are lots of other search engines out there still; many alternative ways to complete the synaptic connections we’ve grown accustomed to outsourcing to the great gods of Google.

We should worry less, perhaps, about what happens when a dominant provider such as Google fails, and more about what might happen if the Net ever reaches the point of working too well.

At some point this morning, every single Google search started bringing up linkjacked results with each result flagged like this:

Seems that every single site has now been Net Nannied into oblivion – doesn’t matter what you search for, EVERYTHING is flagged with “This site may harm your computer”.

No news out of Google as at 9:56am Eastern, nothing on the Google blog, and no response yet from the handful of people I know at Google who I’ve sent email to – but then, it is Saturday morning. Have to believe someone at the Google HQ is on this though. It seems pretty clear they’ve been hacked in some way – and it’s a hack on a huge scale.

Meanwhile, in the absence of regular media coverage, the Twitter stream is on fire. Search for #googmayharm or #googmeltdown on Twitter and follow the story as it unfolds in real time there.

This is destined to be yet another example of Twitter’s emerging importance – denied their Google lifeline, people are turning to Twitter in droves to find out what’s going on, ask questions, swap stories. It’s the global digital heartbeat of our time.

UPDATE: 10:17 est – I thought at first it was fixed. The same innocuous search for “disney” I ran above now comes up clean. Tested this – it’s still broken with other searches, but the second time you run a search it comes through OK.

UPDATE: 10:19 est – Now looks like it’s really getting fixed. I think they’re rolling the cleanup through servers and datacentres. Some searches still bust, but most are clean. Depends on which server cluster your search hits. Now just waiting to see what Google’s PR people are going to say about this. Certainly not the catastrophic digital alzheimer’s story some tweets seemed to suggest, but made for an interesting and exciting little half an hour there while we contemplated the death of our groupmind.

UPDATE: 10:27 est – Interesting… I wonder if this global Net nanny hack swept across more than just Google’s search servers. I have my blog set to auto-forward all of my new posts to my Gmail account (paranoid belt-and-braces backup). This post got flagged by Gmail as spam. That’s certainly never happened before. Was the Google hack wider than just search?

UPDATE 10:32 est – a good point made by John Minnihan (@jbminn on Twitter): I’ve been carelessly throwing around the word “hacked”, but there’s no real evidence yet to say whether this was a hack or just a cockup in updating something at Google’s servers. This could have been something like an accidental tweak of their malware filters that then rolled out through their entire back end. Curious to see what Google says.

UPDATE 10:40 est – I’ve seen a suggestion floating around Twitter that the source of the meltdown may have been server failure at StopBadware.org, described as “Google’s outsourced malware partner”. Perhaps, but that seems a little unlikely. Would Google’s infrastructure really be so ill-designed as to allow a single point of failure to knacker their entire search operation like this? More likely, I think, that the flood of click-through traffic to stopbadware.org (linked to from every broken search result this morning) caused the Stop Badware servers to grind to a halt after the fact.

FINAL UPDATE:Feb 2, 11:44 est – It’s a couple of days later and this Google brownout is old news now. For the sake of completeness, though, I wanted to just add one final update. As this post on the Official Google Blog states, it turns out that the source of the problem was actually a maddeningly simple human error. Looks like there’s some shared responsibility between Google and StopBadware.org (here’s the post from StopBadware about the issue), and a little unsurprising finger-pointing going on.

Now that the dust has settled and all is once more right with the world, it’s worth noting that Google’s response was genuinely impressive here. Problems are bound to happen. Sometimes, even relatively small errors can have catastrophic results – it was a single-character coding error, for example, that ultimately led to NASA’s emergency “destructive abort” of the Mariner 1 spacecraft at a cost of many millions of dollars. The test of any individual or organization’s mettle is how they respond when things go pear-shaped.

In this case, Google caught the issue fast, diagnosed and rolled out a fix, and then owned up to the problem on their blog and in media interviews, providing full information about how they goofed. Good job. Even better, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, put her name to the post on the Google blog – not some junior communications staffer or anonymous spokesdrone.

The only thing I’d like to have seen them add to this would be to open that blog to comments. There was an enormous amount of online conversation about this issue, it would be great to see Google fully joining that conversation, as opposed to this uni-directional broadcast approach.

They are maintaining a list of all trackbacks to their blog post, so that all sides of the discussion get some airtime. But for an issue as big as this, I’d like to see them diving into a comment thread and addressing people’s questions and concerns in an open dialogue.

Still, a pretty solid crisis response, and one which should help mitigate any damage to their reputation from this short-lived but very high-profile issue.

I’m back from chairing an enjoyable, lively and (I thought) really interesting panel session at tonight’s IABC professional development event, Social Media and the Modern Communicator. Many thanks to the IABC Toronto Chapter for organizing and promoting this sold-out event, and to the terrific panelists for giving generously of their time and knowledge – shout out to Mathew Ingram, Jen Evans and Boyd Neil.

Too tired to blog at length, but a quick observation and some links I promised…

First, probably the most startling moment of the evening, for me, was very early on just as we were getting warmed up. I’ve been speaking about social media at conferences, seminars and other events for nearly seven years, and I figured we must be getting way beyond the 101 level by now.

We had an audience of just over 200 professional communicators at the event tonight. In an effort to gauge the general awareness and knowledge level of the audience, I asked a couple of quick qualifying questions. Here they are, with my rough assessment of the results based on a show of hands:

1. How many people here are actively blogging?
- Approximately a dozen people, perhaps 20 at most (out of the 200)

2. How many people here are on Twitter?
- Close to 60% of the room!

This blows my mind. I know that Twitter is a heck of a lot quicker and easier to get started with than full-on blogging, and I guess it requires less commitment and close to zero tech skills, but I’m still delighted and amazed at just how many people in Toronto have caught the bug.

Hey! Shel Israel! – we got your Twitterville right here!

Is this what it’s like elsewhere? Has the growth of Twitter been as fast in other cities, or is the T.O. really as special as we like to think it is? With so many Twitter apps out there, has anyone worked up a Google Maps mashup that shows the concentration of tweets per capita in various parts of the world?

Fascinating stuff (for a complete nerd like me). I’m going to have to do some more digging around to see if this is anomalous or if it just seems that way from inside the bubble.

Meanwhile, my esteemed panelists and I dropped a number of links and tips during tonight’s session, which I promised I’d try to catalogue here. I don’t know that I captured all of them, but here are the ones I remember.

Social Media Policies
A few good examples were mentioned, including those used at Dell, IBM, and elsewhere. I’ve been collecting and bookmarking something of a list of interesting social media and corporate blogging policies for a couple of years using the Delicious social bookmarking tool. You’ll find all of these (including the Dell and IBM examples) here: http://delicious.com/michaelocc/policy

I also mentioned (with my tongue only half in my cheek) the shortest (and one of the best) HR policy manuals ever written (“Rule 1: Use Good Judgement,” etc.). I blogged about this a while back in the context of policies for corporate Twitter use, here.

Thirdly, you might be interested in a sample of one of the “online interaction” policies we’ve helped develop for our clients. You can find one in the privacy policy at the foot of the Herbal Magic site, here.

Tools for Internal Social Media
There was a good question at one point about “Twitter behind the firewall”. Our panelists rattled off a bunch of examples, probably too fast for many people to note down. Here are some applications worth checking out.

Yammer (Twitter-like internal micro-blogging, as used by Boyd’s firm)

Present.ly (think: Yammer, but with better admin controls and UI options. My colleague, Dave Fleet, has a great review of Present.ly here)

For the technically adept, there’s also Laconica – a DIY platform to build your own Twitter-like apps (of which the best known implementation so far is at Identi.ca)

It’s also worth mentioning, that if you want to add full-fledged blogging inside the firewall, it’s very easy to set up a WordPress installation for internal communications purposes. Works well, easy to administer, and there are a bunch of good people around who can help you get things working how you want them (including, I’m cheesily obliged to point out, a certain great firm that can offer both the design & build work and the strategic consulting help).

Recommended Reading
I asked the panelists for book recommendations and think they offered some terrific ideas. In no particular order, here are the ones I can recall us mentioning (and a couple of bonus titles we didn’t, but perhaps should have):

Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky

What Would Google Do? – Jeff Jarvis

Groundswell – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day – Avinash Kaushik

The Cluetrain Manifesto – Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger

Small Pieces Loosely Joined – David Weinberger

Everything is Miscellaneous – David Weinberger

(You notice a theme here, btw? Basically, you should just read everything UofT alum David Weinberger has ever written, including his splendid blog. Yes, he’s an old friend. Yes, I’m completely biased – but the man is a certified genius and a funny, wonderful writer)

Gonzo Marketing – Chris Locke

Wikinomics – Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

And finally, a personal favourite I think a lot more people ought to read:

Ambient Findability – Peter Morville

And the last little housekeeping link in this now-not-so-short post – we mentioned the US Air Force’s “decision tree” used to determine how and when they will respond to online discussion. Dave Fleet (yes, him again) has a post on the topic here and Toronto’s favourite accordion-playing supergeek social media pioneering thriller from Manila, Joey deVilla, has a bigger, updated version of the chart, here. (Hey, Joey! I think I just made you sound like @Mike_56)

That’s all I can think of for now. Thanks again to all that attended, to the boss for some great live tweeting, and to everyone following on Twitter for splendid questions and discussion during and after.

(Already said this on Twitter earlier tonight, but I’m rather inappropriately pleased with it, so couldn’t resist the crosspost…)

It’s pretty obvious why Loblaws’ “No Name” brand cookies are not as tasty as the fancy ones. They’re sans nom.

That is all.

This is a tale of two disc deaths – and two happy endings.

Over the Christmas break, the 100GB hard drive on my work laptop (let’s call it Dell #1) crashed. I couldn’t boot, couldn’t get through Vista’s Startup Repair, couldn’t rebuild Vista from the original discs – it was dead, dead, dead.

Then just last Saturday, Sausage accidentally knocked the home laptop (Dell #2 – 40GB) off the dining table, while it was running – effectively killing its hard drive too.

Ouch.

The good news with Dell #1, my work machine, is that there weren’t any valuable client documents or other irreplaceable files on the C: drive. All that stuff was safely stored on the servers (having worked in the document management business for a big chunk of my career, I’m pretty careful about that stuff).

There were, however, a big mess of family photos, old documents, and personal files on the drive. Again, these were all files I had copies of elsewhere; the only problem being that the elsewhere, in this case, was our home laptop.

Double ouch.

My work laptop isn’t all that old, so it was good to learn that the drive was still under warranty. Once The IT Department and I had done all we could to prove to ourselves that the drive was indeed utterly b0rked, we reported it to Dell who duly sent out a brand new 100GB drive the very next day. Outstanding. I was able to get the work laptop back up and running fairly quickly (although I’m still tweaking and tuning the setup to get it back to the way it was before the crash).

Meanwhile, I’m left with a big hole in my personal document files, and a dead laptop at home.

As a first step, I sent the drive from Dell #1 out to a data recovery lab for a quote. Meanwhile, I spent an unhappy and fruitless evening trying to rebuild Windows on the drive of Dell #2. Diagnosis: that drive was also utterly and completely b0rked.

The price estimate for the drive from Dell #1 came back from the recovery lab the next day. $1,800. Triple ouch. Really, I’m not too surprised – data recovery is difficult work and, as the lab guys will always tell you – you have to think of the value of the data they’re restoring for you. If I’d made the mistake of keeping a lot of client work on the local drive, $1,800 to restore it would have been a snip. But for a bunch of personal files I might be able to recover by other means? Hmmm…

Instead, I asked the lab to send the drive back to me and moved on to a two-stage plan B. I hopped over to TigerDirect.ca to browse their cable selection, then paid a visit later that evening to our local cheapo computer shop (the excellent Beach Impressions on Queen Street East) and scored a replacement drive for Dell #2.

Installing and setting up the new drive in the home laptop has (so far) proven entirely painless – and I’m in the process of restoring everything that we lost, thanks to the wonders of Mozy Home backup. I can’t recall who first turned me onto Mozy, but I can enthusiastically recommend it to anyone looking for a seamless backup solution.

This little beastie sits in the background, sending backup data up into the cloud whenever your machine is idle. It’s just about foolproof. For a reasonable annual fee, you get unlimited online storage and a backup regime you don’t even have to think about.

With Dell #1 back in one piece and happy again, and Dell #2 on the road to complete recovery, thanks to the wonders of Mozy’s cloud storage, the only thing remaining was to see what I could do with that dead drive from Dell #1.

Again – I knew I’d have most of the family photos and stuff I needed up on Mozy’s servers – but what if there was something missing? Something I’d only had on Dell #1 and had forgotten to synch?

Thanks to a tip from a friend, I knew TigerDirect would probably have what I needed. Sure enough, I was able to find a cable to connect the fancy SATA drive from Dell #1 to a USB port on Dell #2. I found this little marvel for a mere twenty bucks.

As I write this, the “dead” drive from Dell #1 is churning away on the table beside me, happily squirting data onto the new drive I installed in Dell #2. Hooking up the USB-to-SATA connection couldn’t have been easier and, although a few files seem to be FUBAR, most of the photos and other stuff on the old drive appear to be intact.

So. The final reckoning:

Professional data recovery quote for one dead 100GB drive: $1,800
Estimated cost for professional recovery on 40GB drive: hard to say, but I doubt it would have been any less than $800
Estimated total: $2,600

One USB-to-SATA drive cable: $19.99 plus shipping & tax (about $30 all in)
One replacement 80GB hard drive for Dell #2: $55.57 including tax.

Total data loss: minimal
Net savings: about $2,500

That make me one happy (and smug) geek.