I have no idea how you can “plugged [your] cable line into the ‘wrong outlet’” of a cable modem, but apparently you can to disastrous effect. Doing so can cause a cable modem to explode. That kinda makes me glad my cable modem is safely nestled in a closet away from my Mac Pro and external hard drives.
I’d like to think this is a freak accident, but it does underline an important issue that most computer users don’t take seriously enough. The owner of that poor Powerbook lost over 500 GB of important data that were spread over the internal 80 GB hard drive, two 300 GB Maxtor drives, and a 160 GB Lacie drive. Rough.
The lessons here are:
1) Backup your data. 2) Keep one set of backups “offsite” either in a different building, or at least in a different room.
I’ll admit that I don’t follow the latter rule as it can be a costly proposition if you want to have a full backup. Alternatively, you could just backup just essential data to DVDs or to a service such as Amazon’s S3. Don’t learn the lesson the hard way. Develop a plan now and stick to it so you can “shrug off” data loss disasters.
[via Mac DevCenter]
A phone line will fit in an ethernet jack.