well, that's one of those things that could be worse

[winterbadger]

It could also be better.

My hard drive on my desktop died.

The techs at the local computer store were able to diagnose it, replace it, and recover most of the immediately obvious data (basically what was in my My Documents folder). A massive relief.

They did not recover my applications. I can reload all of those. What I cannot easily reload are all the links I had saved and the several thousand pieces of email I had stored.

Yes, laugh at me all you want now. I save email. And, yes, I have not until now been a back-up person.

The latter will change, but unless I can get them to go back through the old drive and recover the files that constituted my electronic memory, there are a lot of things I will have to be reminded of for the next few months.

I could be happier. But I could also be much, much sadder. If I had lsot all the bulk of my files...that would have been dire.

Comments

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

If you want an easy online backup system I suggest www.XDrive.com for your most important but not so personal files.

Free 5Gb data and as long as you have broadband quite easy to use.

Handy for bookmarks etc...

[winterbadger]

Excellent suggestion, thank you!

My current ISP provides a similar service, but considering how unreliable their mail servers are, I would hate to need them to come through in a pinch with my precious files.

I think I will also have a couple of flash drives for backing up critical short-term documents. I was horrified to imagine what might have happened in this circumstance had I been already doing editing work part time when this happened. At the very least, I would have lost six days of productivity, and if the files had been unrecoverable...

[kathygnome.livejournal.com]

Wow, sorry. I lost mine a few months ago. For me it was old gaming pictures. Our real pictures are saved, but the gaming ones, some going back for 6 years were stuck in the Everquest program folder.

I have a couple of suggestions about links and email.

For links, get Firefox if you haven't already and get something called "foxmarks." It stores all your links online and will synchronize them between different computers. (Or restore them if you lose them.) It also gives you a web page version of your links, though I've never used mine. It's easy to setup and after that you just forget about it and it does it's thing.

Also, consider gmail. It gives you oodles of storage. I now have I think it's three years of stored mail on it. And it's very reliable and efficient. I was really dubious, but give it a try. It really is good.

[winterbadger]

Thanks! :-)

The first thing I did last night was dig around in the Firefox add-ons and get FoxMarks! It's kind of closing the barn door now, but with computers the door is always blowing open again, as it were.

And you're right about Gmail; in fact, I think we had a conversation about the benefits of server-based mail as opposed to POP mail back when we were both working at UPA. :-) There's something about having the mail right there on my drive that I like, but of course the problem is that if your drive goes away, so does the mail, whereas if you lose Internet access temporarily, you won't be able to send mail anyway (plus, one can always forward Gmail to a POP account if one really wants to DL it...)

Step by step we learn...

[kathygnome.livejournal.com]

You can pop mail out of gmail if you want.

[luscious-purple.livejournal.com]

Another alternative for bookmarks is del.icio.us. I've been using it since the hard drive on my previous work computer died. Granted, all the files I use on the job are saved on a network drive and are meticulously backed up every single night. However, my browser (we were using IE 6 at the time, I think) saved the bookmarks to my hard drive, and I had lost the list of 25 or so Web sites I had bookmarked for the feature article I had just started to work on. So I had to go back and redo all my searches.

Del.icio.us uses a tagging system, so it's easy to classify your bookmarks any way you'd like. And you can share them with other people.

[winterbadger]

Thanks!