Loss of Information
What’s on your hard drive? Photos? MP3s of all your favorite songs? Emails from your sweetie?
I’ve had my “new” computer since 2004. It contains lesson plans from my oldest son’s Kindergarten year on up to this year and worksheets that I’ve made for him. It has all the bulletins I’ve made for our church for the last two years, all of our family photos including some that I have no other copies of, and around 100 MP3s that we paid for but can’t replace. Since I’m a freelance writer, the hard drive also contains all of the articles I’ve written for clients over the last several months and stories that I wrote as far back as high school. It contains all the email addresses of my friends, contacts, clients–those, of course, can be found again but it will take some work. It contains copies of hundreds of incoming emails and thousands of outgoing emails, including some very special ones to and from my husband from many years ago and the first email that my oldest son ever sent. It said “i love you mom.” Foolishly, I’ve never backed up any of this.
Why am I telling you this? Because Saturday morning, the computer had a “stroke” and won’t boot anymore. We’ve sent it to a computer tech who is trying to see if it can be fixed, but there’s a clear possibility that the hard drive will need to be wiped clean.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. There’s still a chance that my irreplacable files can be recovered, but there’s an equal chance that they can’t. What I’m getting at is: Back up your hard drive! I never dreamed that this would happen to our computer. It has been running beautifully with nary a problem. On Saturday morning, it was working fine and I was plugging along as usual. Then things started to run a little sluggishly and then froze completely. I cut the power and then turned it back on just to see “Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter.” For some reason, the system restore disk I have isn’t being recognized by the computer either.
So in the space of 30 minutes, I went from “fine” to “totally unfine.” I had no warning, no anticipation that it would happen. Which is why I say to you, go back up your hard drive right now!
Cindy,
I agree with this, I have lost everything before. I started backing my files up at online place. I used to do CD’s and had some that got erased. Thanks for the reminder, I need to keep working on mine. Oh also hope to get to know you in the TOS crew! Angie F.
We do have an external hard drive, but you still have to be disciplined to keep it up!!!
Thanks for the reminder, I guess we need to do that again!
Great reminder! Have you ever heard the joke about Christ and Satan in battle through emails or essays– it was something computer related. Anyway, God the father sent a lightning bolt that short circuited both computers. It was decided later that all was not lost and Christ could still get His messages through because “Jesus Saves”.
Your blog is beautiful! Thanks for sharing it with all of us at TOS Crew
Regenia S (aka Supermomof6)
Once, I lost every picture I ever took of my daughter in her first year and a half of life…SO HEARTBREAKING! Luckily, I had sent about half of them to my mom, so I was able to recover some of them. You’d think I’d learn my lesson, but I have yet to back up the photos in my current system…I better get around to doing that!
I’m a fellow TOS Homeschool Crew-er! Glad to see I’m not the only one from WV! Do you mind if I ask where you are? I only know one other HS family here! :0) You can email me if you’d like: tikesandtots at hotmail dot com
Enjoying your blog!
Brandi
Backing up everything sounds like such a chore. Is there an easy way to do it? What do you recommend? I have been putting my pictures on CDs as well. I also have another question perhaps you could answer for me–if I upload video or pictures to my blog and then delete them from my computer, would they still show on my blog? I know they take up a lot of memory. I have a photobucket account but don’t like using it because it’s hard to manipulate the folders there and I also have a flickr account that I only put a few into and don’t generally use. It’s just a pain to load them all the time. I take a lot of pictures now that I have a digital camera.
I’m emailing you, Karen! Thanks for the comment.
I finally got around to bcking up my main documents and my password documents yesterday onto a CD.
I have another question though. I’ve read that we should also back up our blogs but I don’t know how! Do you?