Recovering from a data scary moment
A couple of days ago my family went up Pistol River to swim at Deep Creek, a local spot where the river bunches up so you can swim without freezing to death or drowning. I like a certain small sandy beach at Deep Creek, but you have to wade across the river to get to it. Unfortunately I forgot to take my BlackBerry cell phone out of my dungaree cutoffs, and I was in the middle of the river when I remembered it. When I got to the other side, the BlackBerry was flickering like it was gasping for air. I shut it off immediately and hoped it would dry out by itself.
But it didn’t. By the time we returned home a few hours later, the glass display had fogged up. Youngest son Sam came to the rescue and told me, “Put it in rice overnight, Dad. The rice will draw out the water.” I did, and by morning it worked! Thank you, thank you, thank you 15-year-old son Sam. I had a lot of data besides phone numbers on that BlackBerry.
I’ve since backed up my BlackBerry data to a hard disk storage device, then did the same for my laptop, which it turns out hadn’t been backed up for about a year. You need a data scary moment like this now and then to make you remember how much grief it can cause you to lose a lot of computer data.
July 11th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who do regular data backups and those who have never had a hard drive failure.
July 12th, 2010 at 10:15 am
Amen to that! I learned that lesson many years ago, and I almost had to relearn it again.
July 19th, 2010 at 10:32 am
My husband left his phone out in the rain at a fair we were at and it got really wet. He put it in a pint size canning jar wraped in paper towel and put it in our “hot water tank” a very large coffee pot and left it for several hours. It sealed and he took it out and opened it and the phone was fine. The rice sounds easier tho. Next time we will do it your way.
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I wonder if this would work for a watch that has accidentally gotten moist???