In the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold Kushner his philosophy basically is, it happens it just plain happens. It's part of our lives. We can deal with it or let the event overwhelm us, and paralyze us into despair.
About nine days ago, my computer crashed! And I mean crashed. Thankfully, my husband is a retired university professor and the IT department is willing to help. Hopefully they can do their magic and get things running. Sadly though I already know that I've lost ALL my family documents and photos. No I did not have a backup.
When this reality set in, I assure you, there was a ROYAL melt down. Can you blame me? Years of work gone, just gone is a matter of seconds. I had three choices: 1) blame everybody else or 2) curl up and never touch a computer again or 3) figure out if I had a flash drive or a CD that had some of these items. Well I could not blame anyone else. It was clearly my fault for not having a backup. Option 2 was never an option. But option 3 offered a glimmer of hope.
That glimmer of hope, that sliver lining appeared when I remembered that I had three flash drives that at various times I had copied over documents and photos from an old computer. Though this isn't an actual backup it does have some of the valuable documents and pictures.
Sadly I guess this means there's a Do Over in my future whether I wanted to or not. But more importantly what is the lesson I learned, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!
I'm sorry. I know I shared with you, but for everyone else's knowledge, the lifetime on a consumer hard disk in your computer is rated at 12 - 18 months. That is one to 1.5 years! That is it. Anything outside that, consider yourself lucky and setup a backup plan. A simple little external USB hard drive, 500GB can be had for $50.
ReplyDeleteYou are handling this a lot better than I would! But, you are right... what else can you do? And, as I told you, my computer crashed about 10 years ago. My greatest loss was all of our photos from Hawaii. However, at the time, I had a homeschool blog where I was posting some photos. I have 6 photos on there and I can still see them, though the resolution is too poor for printouts.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry for your loss, but I appreciate the reminder! I know there are a lot of things I need to back up better!
Oh my! That was a terrible experience. Losing all your important documents without having backups is totally appalling. Well, just look on the bright side because every negative experience teaches us something, and at least you learned from Anyway, I hope that everything still turned out well for you, despite that predicament. Thanks for sharing that, Jill! All the best to you!
ReplyDeleteLillian Walker @ Taylor Works