The Retort

From the Desk of One Baroque College Student: The Value of Backing up Files and the Pain of Loss

February 19th, 2010 by Lou Donaldson Of The Retort Staff

Images of my pieces, articles I wrote for the paper, papers I wrote for classes, my music, and pictures of my two kids from the past year and a half - all gone in the blink of an eye. All because I didn't have them backed up; never even thought about it, in all honesty. I have some of them on my notebook (a small neutered computer), but sadly not the photos of my kids. Thank God for hard copy photos; I am going to get prints of the photos I take more often.

So after opening it up, blowing it out and trying to put the power supply in my old box, Brian (the computer man who built my Frankenstein box that has decided not to work) came over and he and my husband decided that as a last ditch effort they would try to take the hard drive out of mine, put it in his computer and attempt to rip my files off my hard drive. This would save what was most important to me...i.e., the photos of my kids.

So how else will this be affecting me other than making it so that I can’t spend time on Facebook playing farmville or spend many, many hours running about slaughtering the alliance without a care? Well, I have a full sheet (22x30) watercolor that I have to do; to make it easier I get the general layout and idea put together in Photoshop, thus I have my basic idea down and can tweak it as necessary. This was completed yesterday, though it still needed to be put on the watercolor paper. Thankfully I had moved the PowerPoint presentation to my jump drive for class; small miracle. But I have a midterm due February 11 as well as a research paper coming up and all other forms of wondrous crap for which having a computer at my disposal would be incredibly helpful.

Sadly, even if Brian and my dearest are able to pull my files from the hard drive, the chances of me getting a new computer anytime soon is for naught. The earliest I could get another computer for myself would be sometime in sometime in April, and while that’s technically not that long and I will be able to use my husband’s computer during the interim, it still is a pain and April is a tad too far away.

Okay, putting it in my hubby’s computer didn’t work, so now we are going to put it in the freezer (in a plastic bag to protect it from moisture) and then after it gets good and cold, try it again. The theory behind this is that metal contracts when it gets cold, so then hopefully the disks that make up the hard drive will contract enough to be able to spin. So about an hour later they pulled it out of the freezer and went to try it again, but sadly the hard drive wouldn't spin. That means it’s beyond all hope and there is no chance of getting back the past year and a half’s worth of pictures of my kids. But Brian tells me there might be one more slim, by-the-skin-of-the-teeth hope for retrieving some of the files from my dilapidated hard drive (keep in mind that my main concern is the photos of my kids). He's going to take it home and see if he can work his computer man magic on it, so we will have to wait, see and pray.

Update on February 8, 2010: The hard drive is totally and completely screwed up. This is where the twenty-twenty hindsight kicks in and I start thinking of coulda-woulda-shouldas: maybe I should have backed up my files!

Excuse me as I wipe the sarcasm off my chin and roll my eyes; in any case, lesson learned and I will be backing up my files from now on. :(