Yesterday my husband came upstairs to let me know a drive had died on my desktop. He didn't know which one and the computer has 5 drives. He was working from home and didn't have time to deal with it then. None of them were completely backed up as getting down there to do it is hard with the kids. So I knew I had lost something and had to wait until evening to find out what. Well, it turns out it was the boot drive so mostly what I lost was installed programs and all my settings. Probably the worst thing I lost was "My Documents" and all my old emails. My husband, though, lost quite a bit of stuff he had stored on there since his computer doesn't have much space.
Then it got worse. While trying to get a new boot drive going, he accidentally deleted the partition on the external drive that he didn't realize was connected and turned on. That external drive is where I store all my photos that are waiting to be burned to DVD. When he told me that, I almost threw up. I thought I had lost half of my toddler's life in photos. For an hour, I tried to concentrate on work when all I could think of was those photos. Finally I gave up working and decided to back up all the photos that are still on my laptop to another external drive just to give myself a little piece of mind in case Murphy decided to strike a third time. To my amazement, I realized that the photos on that drive were far more current than I realized. Because I wasn't able to make DVD backups often, I had a habit of copying photos to multiple drives and had lost track of what was where. So, by an amazing stroke of luck, it seems like I haven't lost any photos after all!
Still, though, that was quite a scare. And there's still all the data lost on the original failed drive. Nothing so precious as my kids' photos, but still a loss of important documents. So I'm putting out the reminder to all of you. You never know when disaster will strike. I was far too careless for too long. I know I should back up but getting down there is such a pain and I just kept putting it off. And now it's too late. It would cost hundreds, maybe thousands, to get the data off that drive and, though the stuff was important to me, it wasn't quite the level of importance to justify that. So now it's gone.
So go, right now, and back up your data while you can.
Michelle
Sorry to hear about your data scare. I know it's tough to lose intangible things that you work for. I know that once I had a digital camera stolen that had some priceless pictures on it.... and once I lost a novel I was writing and nearly had finished because my parents erased all of the information from a computer I was using... I'm pretty careful after those experiences and similar ones to back up my work.
Oh, wow, a whole novel? That would kill me. I used to write and couldn't manage more than short stories. If I had managed a whole novel and lost it, I think they would have had to commit me.
Thanks for the reminder about the camera. I've been letting the photos build up there for too long.
Michelle
My computer stopped working one day so my husband being a computer guy looked up the required parts to update and fix it. It cost the same for a new computer with a big flat screen monitor so we got me a new computer and he took the harddrive out of the old one and added it to my new computer so I lost nothing.
Yeah, having the computer die isn't as bad as having a hard drive die. Hardware can be replaced. The data is priceless.
Michelle
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