3. One of my Week in the Life layouts is featured over on Ali Edwards' blog today! How exciting is that ?
4. My birthday is this coming Saturday. That's fodder for a whole different post. But it is relevant to my next random entry. And I wanted to let everyone know in advance, just in case you wanted to get me a present! Ha - JK!
I was at a Crop on Saturday, working on a digi layout for "The Street Where You Live." I tried to save the layout in progress and my computer hung for a while, then I got a "timed out" message. Never saw that before. I tried saving again. This time I got a "name not valid" message (which in computer speak means the computer did not recognize the drive I was trying to save the .psd file to). So I clicked over to ACDSee - and all of my files were EMPTY! GONE! I tried rebooting the computer. Nothing. I tried a full shut down, unplug everything, restart it all. Nothing.
By this time I was panicked, but still thought possibly it was the computer rather than the drive. Of course it meant my day at the crop was spent internet surfing instead of scrapbooking - not the productive day I was looking forward to. And I honestly felt lost. Naked. I told the Universe that I could deal with the loss of my beloved EHD if the files were salvagable. Of course, I would prefer that it is all a terrible joke and the drive works just fine. Maybe it is just the stupid laptop, right? I came home. Plugged the EHD into my desk top computer. Nothing. Not a blip. Call the time of death.
But surely, you are by now thinking to yourself, being the good scrapbooker that you are, you have everything backed up and you've only lost today's work, right? WRONG! You see, my dear EHD was NOT. BACKED. UP. ANYWHERE. Even though every image I've ever shot since going digi, every digi paper and element I've purchased, every layout I've ever made, including all the ones I have NOT had printed since last ummm October, and my ACDSee database with all my tagging information to date is stored on this drive. And I have nobody to blame but myself.
This is where the aforementioned birthday comes into play. I knew the lack of a back-up system was a potential issue. So I had asked for a 500 GB EHD for my birthday. With the intention that I would migrate all my working files to the new EHD and use my current (now dead) EHD for back-up purposes. I had the best of intentions. Truly. But my EHD went and died a week too soon. Kind of a cruel twist of fate.
Luckily my DH is a geek and he works with geeks. So after obsessing for the last two days over all I had potentially lost, today DH took the corpse to work with him to see if my precious files could be saved. He was giving me 50/50 odds and did not want to give me false hope. But hope was all I had to hang onto. The initial report was that they had tried "all the usual" utilities, but with no luck. So they tried another and I was told that it could take all night to run before they would know. It's like waiting for a friend to come out of surgery. Pacing the floor. Unable to focus. A real nail biter.
A bit ago DH emailed to say "Good News!" The utility worked and they were able to recover what looks like all my files! Hallelujah! I am sooooooooo relieved that the Universe saw fit to grant my files a second life and I promise I will take better care in the future. This experience was far too close for comfort and once I have the restored files in place, my first order of business will be to BACK UP all my files. Then order prints of all completed layouts - no more waiting!
And to send out a friendly reminder to all my friends who store digital photos or digital scrapbooking on their computers... Have YOU backed up lately?????
8 comments:
I, too, mourn the loss of "Lost". I was happy to see all the couples reunited and everyone seemed to be happy, but I wanted them to be happy in life, not death. If they had aged them, then I could assume they had lived a full life and reunited in death, but not so. But I read a blog that opines that they did all live full lives before they died, and were reunited once they had all died. I'll accept that explanation.
So glad you were able to retrieve your data, and I'll take your warning seriously when we get home from Texas!
You are so fortunate to have your files retrieved!!! I would have been a wreck even though mine are backed up with Time Machine every few hours. I just don't trust this stuff. We also back up at Backblaze, an online back-up service. It's pretty cheap, but it takes a LONG time to get backed up initially. I always worry about the EHD failing, too! Now I feel like I'm covered.
You have me worried here,Cheri .... I save all my files to computer and an external hard drive......I thought that WAS backing them up!!!! Does this mean I need 2 external hard drives 'just in case'??
So glad you've saved it all though.
And I too. am in mourning for 'lost'.
Oh, honey - scary! Hooray for computer geeks... I back up my files regularly but it was only a near miss of my own that made me so scrupulous to do so. I have a weekly scheduled back-up but whenever I update my files I run an extra one, just to make sure.
As far as the blog hop goes, you're more than welcome - I'm so pleased you joined in :-)
Coming from someone who had a lot on a laptop, not backed up, and experienced the "blue screen of death", and also coming from being married to a computer "geek", I swear they all tell you the odds are "low to nil" just so they can look like even BIGGER heroes when they fix it. I swear they're all sitting around your broken drive just drinking coffee and playing poker and saying, "should we fix it now?" "Nah, let's give it another few hours..." and then it's something as simple as pulling out the itty-bitty backup drive that only "they" know about and suddenly "recovering" all your files. Yeah, I know.. I live in a fantasy world, but still... after many, many "saves" from my husband... I'm beginning to think it's not as hard as he claims it to be... :) Congrats on your "save" and I, too, am mourning LOST, deeply, madly, truly. But that's a conversation for another day... I still can't *sniff* stop beint *sniff* sad long enough...
Bummer on the Hard Drive. Had to skim the Lost stuff, still need to watch! lol
Woa, thank goodness for a happy ending! That was one scary story (and a very nicely told one at that). I hope you've got something lovely planned for your birthday :)
Ack! Not the EHD ... mine died recently too :-( Fortunately we are all backed up - a constant source of worry for me!
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