I learned an incredibly valuable lesson this week: back up all important (and non-important) files on the computer. So Wednesday night our computer crashed; I was the unlucky recipient of the "Blue screen of Death" (is that supposed to be some kind of sick joke designed to make people go into shock). After trying for an hour to get my computer to boot I was able to determine that it was the hard drive (and then I did what every mature adult does, I cried and cried).
Of course this all happened as I was finishing up an extensive Photoshop project for my Grandparents' surprise 55th wedding anniversary party (that's 10 hours of my life I'll never get back). And then I had the sickening realization that I am dork (yes, I should have figured that out years ago). I hadn't backed up anything on my computer for over a year. Bye bye over 1,000 pictures of Peter, financial and tax records, 50 GB of music on iTunes, and my perfectly edited "favorites" list on Internet Explorer! I could handle losing everything except for the photographs (I don't think Peter would enjoy being squished into 3 month sized clothing to recreate photos).
Well, Thursday morning I dropped off the computer at a local computer data recovery shop where I begged the owner to save my photos. To be honest I didn't have much hope that anything could be saved from the hard drive, but the shop owner reassured me that he was 90% confident that he could recover all or most of our data. And since the guy was wearing a comic book t-shirt, a ratty hoodie, wrinkled pants, and had unkempt hair and the pale skin of someone who spends most of his time indoors behind a computer screen, I completely trusted him. We got a call today from the guy that everything had been recovered and transferred to the new hard drive. Ryan is the one that picked up the computer (I think he was afraid I would actually kiss the guy because I was so happy). So now I am happily reloading programs. And I'm doing something I should have done numerous times before: I'm backing up everything!
you should of had a mac!
ReplyDeleteDo you want to buy me one?
ReplyDeletei'm so glad you were able to get everything back! i lost a full memory card from my camera once, and i honestly thought i was going to pass out--and that was just a week or two of pictures.
ReplyDeleteComputers crash only at the worst possible time. Now that I think about it, I haven't backed up in nearly six months. . . oops. I should do something about that. Thank you for the reminder!
ReplyDeleteBlue screen is usually indicates a Windows Operating System failure rather than the demise of the hard drive. It can be tricky to pull stuff off a windows C: drive though.
I'm glad you got your photos back!