Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Lessons Learned

So yesterday my (10 year old) computer got tired of running. It wouldn't load webpages and kept telling me things were crashing. I tried to restart which resulted in it telling me it had fatal errors that could not be fixed after it ran a restore program twice at start up. It ended up just sitting there like giant rock, not turning on, not making noise and me panicking that I had not listened to myself over the past few weeks and uploaded all my pictures that I have nowhere else but this hard drive onto a back up device or cloud account. I called Alex (who has been studying computers at college) in a desperate attempt to get a magic bullet to fix the problem.

HMMMMmmmmmmm, he said, Sounds like your hard drive is dying.
NOOOOOOOOOO, I can't lose my pictures. I knew I could probably get them back AT SOME in the future by paying someone to retrieve them, but it wasn't a guarantee.

After I stared at the giant non working rock for awhile longer, and tried two more times to start it with the same result, I came over for one last try, explained to the rock that it simply HAD to work, not only for my pictures, but (less importantly in my mind) that it was how I made money, that I couldn't afford to replace it, and if it didn't work I was going to cry. A lot. For a long time.

One last try, one last button push... waiting...waiting...

And low and frickin' behold the damn thing started up without a hitch.

I am now uploading all my pictures to Flickr (one terabyte of free storage) and thanking whatever computer god decided it didn't want to see me bawling my head off.
Lesson learned here.... ALWAYS back up your stuff!!!!