Let’s start off with the Good – I don’t have to pay some anonymous computer repair guy $55 an hour to tool around with my computer. My favorite IT guru offered to take a look at it for free and see if he could fix the problem. No cash out of my pocket makes Kelly a very happy camper. Brent is seriously in line for sainthood. I shall anoint him as soon as someone hands me over my scepter and crown.The Bad – despite all his best attempts and ingenious ideas, nothing he could do could save him from the inevitable to get the computer to work again. That’s right. Every writer’s worst nightmare: “Sorry ma’am, but it appears we need to reformat your hard drive. I’m afraid you’ll lose everything.” After CPR was performed and they got my heart started again, I realized that wasn’t the worst fate in the world. Thankfully I back things up on a regular basis on CD.
The Ugly – I had kept reminding myself to do my back up for the past few weeks, but then I would shut off my computer at the end of the morning and forget, then tell myself, okay well do it tomorrow. Then I’d forget again. So while normally I back up once a week, this time around it wasn’t so. Which means there’s at least 2 weeks of work that I’ll lose.
The Odd – A couple things for this list. When I took my annual trek to the psychic, she told me I would have computer problems, possibly a crashed system, around May/June. Considering her track record of bang on predictions with me, you’d think I would have paid closer attention. Then again, maybe that was why my subconscious kept screaming the reminder to back it up. The other odd thing was for the past week and a half I wrote long hand and hadn’t yet typed the stuff in yet. And for the two weeks before my writing felt like trudging through sludge. I didn’t make a whole lot of progress, so the page count wasn’t usually as high as it normally was. Divine intervention by the muse perhaps? And thankfully, the presentation I am giving at our annual chapter retreat this weekend was printed off before the crash, so I have a hard copy. Whew.
So that’s where thing stand. I’ll still have to go through the process of reloading Office, my anti-virus program (I’m switching to McAphee this time around), webshots, tracking down all my Christian Bale pictures again, redoing my address book for Outlook, reconstructing my folders and figuring out what was lost and what was backed up, trying to find the research websites I had saved in my Favorites, the list goes on. It’ll be one of those arduous tasks that takes many hours and probably a fair bit of cursing on my part.
My new motto: Weekly back ups of my whole system are a very good thing.
5 comments:
Kelly - arrgggh - reformating is tres ugly. Good thing you've been writing longhand!
Have you thought of using AVG Free (www.grisoft.com)? It's pretty reliable, free and far less intrusive to your system than either Norton or McAfee (Sean had the same problem as you did on his laptop when something with McAfee went wrong). Just a thought.
I would move Christian Bale to the top of the list. What about Rufus Sewell?
I know your pain, I've been there as well. Good luck recovering.
Tess: Brent did load AVG for me. And he added in some spam killer and spyware too. He's handy to have around.
Rene: Oh yes, CB pixs will get top priority. Rufus pixs I think I may have stored on my CD because I was using him as a model for the hero in D&B.
I'm going to need to back things up a lot better. Your post scared me!!!
wow, you're scaring me... Must go do a big old backup. It's stuff like remembering to back up favorites in IE, and make sure pictures are backed up and things like that that get me. I'm usually pretty good with backing up the writing. I usually remember to email the file to myself to an email account that I don't ever download.
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