Public Service Announcement
For the love of all that you deem electronically dear, backup your computer now and backup regularly. My hard drive died this morning, I've lost everything that was on it, and Steve will be installing a new one for me this evening. Thankfully, my dissertation bits were mostly in a few different places, so I haven't lost a lot (that's what I keep telling myself, anyway), but I've lost a year and a half of images, patterns, class notes, teaching materials, music files...I don't even want to think about it right now.
Lesson learned. Thank God for the urge to blog--at least I've got some photos! :-)
Comments
Oh no! I'm so sorry to hear that! I try to keep the important stuff (pictures, the mss for my book) backed up, but it's hard to keep up on the photos. That's the drawback of doing the blogging--I'm taking all sorts of photos that I wouldn't have bothered with before. (Like a half-knit sweater; really, who NEEDS that?) May I recommend one of those little USB doo-dads that act like a whole 'nother disk drive, that you can copy things to? Easier than burning a CD, and can be edited as needed, and so makes it easier to keep things backed up. Not that expensive, either!
Posted by: Deb | June 12, 2005 06:21 PM
I hear you. I don't back up quite enough, but last year I organized my pictures by year, and I just update to one or two folders. I backed up the old stuff, and then I just need to do updates of the other stuff. Which I don't do regularly enough.
I know better; I used to be in computer hardware repair. But I don't have as much "mission critical" stuff on my hard drive as my former customers generally did.
Posted by: Janice in Ga | June 12, 2005 10:49 PM
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I've been horrible about this. After reading this last night, I stayed up late backing up about 9 months worth of family photos onto discs. You were just the boost that I needed.
Posted by: Siri | June 16, 2005 02:27 AM
My condolences. I hope this doesn't set you back too much.
I had my own computer problems of late. My installation of Windows 98 didn't like RealPlayer and MediaPlayer, which was never a problem until I got part-time work with required me to use these applications. So I reasoned that it was time to upgrade to Windows XP--only Windows XP really, really, REALLY didn't like my hardware setup. In fact, my machine died. :(
All attempts to restore my machine to the previous Win 98 system failed--including wiping the hard drive and installing Windows from scratch!
My Mom suggested I call for help. And through the Yellow Pages I found a small PC shop near my house. They completely rebuilt my machine--new motherboard, CPU, memory, etc.--and installed Windows XP. The new PC works like a dream, and now I can't believe I hobbled along on my old machine for as long as I did.
Fortunately, I didn't lose any data. I've always had a second hard drive. It's tiny by today's standards--only 1.2 Gigs--but it's enough to store all my personal files.
Greetings from Texas Tom. ;)
Posted by: Thomas | June 16, 2005 02:35 PM