Saturday, June 5, 2010

Hard Drives, and why they are important.

I assume everyone knows how important hard drives are. Especially if you are on here. After all, hard drives store everything--the entire life of your computer, and all of the files you add on. That's why it's so important to back things up. Heard that before? I have. And I've meant to.

You know, I can be awfully lazy about things like that. Who isn't, really? I think, to be perfectly honest, that the last time I backed up my computer was about 2 years ago. Maybe even a bit more. Since then, I've added stories, video, music and photos, all of which are terribly, terribly important to me.

I'm going to find out how long ago I backed up my computer today. Why? Because last Thursday, my hard drive failed.

I was watching TV on my computer, in part because I don't have cable and my television set barely gets two channels at the moment. Suddenly, I heard a clicking noise, repeating. "Click-click-click-click-click." And then my computer rebooted, because it was unable to read anything. And it rebooted again, and again, and again.

I freaked out a bit right there, but overall, I've been fairly calm. Not much else I can do, really. Thank Heavens that I emailed a few things to both myself and to my writing bud Amalia T. (It occurs to me that I missed out on her dream sequence blogfest. I just saw it was on Friday, yesterday. Good gravy. I've been out for a while, and it's not been easy. Sorry, Amalia!) And thank Heavens that I took part in as many blogfests as I did. I have some tidbits here and there, a few things saved other places. I'm not as lost as I could be.

But--I still lost a lot. And trust me, I've looked into file retrieval. It's not looking pretty.

So, I'm still here, dear readers and followers. Barely. But please, learn from me--back up your hard drive. Or at least the files that are most important to you. Because if you lose everything, you will feel lost, too.

5 comments:

Amalia Dillin said...

Poor Sarah! Don't worry about the blogfest! My fingers are crossed for you! And I backed up my files, too :)

Just Another Sarah said...

Thanks, Amalia! I am glad you backed up your stuff! :)

Andrew Rosenberg said...

I save everything I work on to the Cloud.
If you use Office, check out skydrive (skydrive.live.com)
You can get a free program from Gladinet that lets you save your files directly to skydrive like you would to a local disk.

Just Another Sarah said...

Thanks for the tip! I'll have to check that out. *Sigh.*

Laura Canon said...

I don't know how much stuff you're trying to save, but I have 3 novels and tons of other stuff on a thumb drive and it's nowhere near full. (This always seems such a miracle to me because I remember putting novels on floppy disks.)
I generally work off the thumb drive and save it to the hard drive periodically.
Of course you can lose thumb drives, too.
I had a similar episode once where revisions I thought had been saved weren't and the worst of it was that I felt so disconnected from the book. I could hardly get started again.
Good luck!