My MacBook is home!
I was finally able to drive up to the shop* to pick it up. The tech booted it up for me as he closed out my work order and I did a quick check to see what could be recovered from the old hard drive. Sadly, not as much as I’d hoped. From what I can tell, I’ve lost:
- all my sewing patterns PDFs;
- an entire month of photographs (including J’s final cross-country race and Miss L’s birthday party); I FOUND THEM!! They were saved to a totally different place on my hard drive but they are HERE!!!
- my photography files, including actions (many of which were not free), notes, etc.;
- the past five years of tax returns (electronic versions);
- ALL my work files, including interviews, notes, research and final stories, from the past 18 months — including things I’ve yet to publish.
I can’t tell you how stupid I feel right about now. I really have no excuse for not having backed up all of my precious documents — especially in light of the fact that I used to manage our newsroom computer system at one of my jobs. And part of that included making sure backups were run on tape nightly.
I’ve always had to learn things the hard way. Now to start shopping for an external hard drive for backing up the Macadoo …
*Outstanding experience with these folks. Great customer service and fast turnaround time. Two thumbs up!
I sat here with my mouth open reading what you’ve lost. You poor thing.
Something to keep in mind with an external drive – keep the kids away from it. My daughter’s accidentally knocked it down (they bumped into the desk and it fell over onto the hardwood floor – the desk is on wheels) and the place where the plug goes in broke off and we can no longer plug it in. My husband was none too happy!
Best of luck, Beth
fyi… my husband & i were able to find a 1 terrabyte hard drive for $139 this week at best buy — a GREAT deal. check your ads from best buy for this week — the sale may still be in progress!
I am putting every photo I have on CDs as I type this… I can live without the other stuff, but not those memories…
Sarahs last blog post..Family Traditions
Oh, how awful! I hope you’re able to reconstruct at least some of those files.
One thing to remember though — an external hard drive does not help you if something happens to your house. I actually backup nightly to my external drive, then weekly (or, okay, when I remember) to my amazon storage through jungle disk. I have a ton stored there — years of photos — and it costs me…maybe $2 a month? I would seriously recommend you keep offsite backup of at least the archived stuff.
Thanks for reminding me that I need to start doing this, too. I’ve already lost a bunch of stuff on the computer I handed down to the boys when I got this one…when it died. Now I need to do that with this one.
Devilish Southern Belles last blog post..All better now….well, somewhat. And other stuff.
Carbonite!!
I am so sorry, sweetie! It sucks to lose the stuff on your hard drive. ((Hugs))
You need to get the Time Capsule for the Mac We use it and it doubles as a router. It has saved us i don’t know how many times! I’m so glad you got it back. but so sad that you lost so much stuff.
Tiff@Three Peass last blog post..A Precious Gift for a Deserving Little Angel
That is so awful. It’s one of my fears. Yet every single time I read it happening to someone I don’t learn. I don’t regularly back up. And that’s with a reminder that pops up every week to remind me to. I just close it.
The last time I backed up my files was in September. Ok let me go back up now.