Note: This blog post is also available via audio.  It is read by the author on Utterli.

I think Microsoft’s Developers and I define “catastrophic failure” a wee bit differently.

First off, in my mind, if I saw a message that said “catastrophic failure,” I’d be thinking – if it’s so catastrophic, why is there even a message?  Doesn’t the meaning of “catastrophic” carry a little bit of a connotation of the end of the world?  

I mean, shouldn’t something that’s catastrophic be, um… obvious?

You might be wondering where I got this message.  I received it from a pop-up message in my Vista system tray, indicating that the last scheduled backup didn’t run.

Catastrophic failure as defined by Microsoft

Since my mind is already in “catastrophe mode,” I’ve decided to say some of the more important things in a blood red font.

Most people who frequent my blog know that I’m a big Vista fan.  But that doesn’t mean angels decended from heaven and said “blessed thou art” on this thing, making it flawless and perfect.  Oh no.  That event has been predicted and reserved by the media for 5 days from now, and you can only have one of those events every 2000 years.  It’s not likely that my laptop received that kind of sanctification.

The above is what I get when I click “more details.”  I don’t think I’d be way off the mark if I suggested that – this does NOT give me useful details.  Maybe I missed the link that said “useful details.”

So what do I do?  I PERSEVERE.  I ignore the error message and attempt to adjust the settings.  I basically adjust NO settings, however, and go through the wizard to back up.

This time (ye gods) it DOES give me a decent error message.

Now all I gotta do is check the disk for errors.

Except that, like all good operating systems, Vista doesn’t let you check the main system disk for errors while it’s actually running and stuff.  All you Unix admins know you have to be in singe-user mode to fsck the root (/) partition.  I don’t know what Macs do in that situation, but I’m sure it’s similar, just with a lot of fantastic eye candy.

So even though you click the “check the disk for errors” link, you don’t really get to do that.  You get to choose to check the disk — say it with me together — when the system next reboots.

Fantastic.  

I might as well do the reboot / check / redo the backups thing while I eat my lunch.

Wait.  Let me resay that in a better font.

Hey!  I swear I didn’t put that in there!  It’s the font!