A couple of nights ago I was up at 3 AM chatting with a good friend of mine and listening to Relax Take It Easy by Mika. I was casually situated in my bed with the laptop on my, you guessed it, lap and with the reading light dimmed out. I was comfortable and carefree.
Then all of a sudden my laptop decided to crash. So it crashed and I could no longer continue my chatting or my listening to music. I was sleepy so I thought, as sleepy people think, that things will be alright in the morning.
But they weren’t. My laptop really meant it, it crashed and I felt unloved like I had been weaned by force. I went to work only to leave four hours later to be with my sick mate, and I tried to nurse it back to health to no avail. Eventually, I gave in, ignored my pride in my outdated computer fixing skills, and took it to the repair shop.
The fixer guy at the repair shop told me he could not retrieve any information saved on my C drive, and I didn’t mind. With a personal history of enduring cyber stalkers and multitudes of viruses and trojans and p2p catastrophes, I had grown computer skin so thick not even Google can penetrate.
But here’s the cosmic iroy. I never, ever, save anything on C. I’ve seen too many PCs crash and burn to trust the accursed drive with my precious digital belongings. The only thing I saved on C was a file I had been working on for three months now. I had placed it on the desktop to motivate myself to work on it by way of constant visual exposure (Yes, I turn tricks on myself and they work). I remember the omnious moment when I put it there, I was too lazy to create it somewhere else and only place a shortcut on the desktop. How could I have known what will happen?
Now that you know the background story, know the purpose of this post. I want to express my anger at the people who constantly ask “Why didn’t you back it up?“
Imagine this: I am so sad and shocked I almost have tears in my eyes, and I come to you to tell you what happened to my three-months’ worth of work. I tell you I can’t believe this has happened, I tell you I am devastated by the loss of time and effort, I tell you I never even saved anything on C but saved this file there in a moment of innocent laziness, I tell you I have to start over from scratch and I am uncertain if I will meet the deadline…
And what do you say?
“Why didn’t you back it up?“
I respond, I don’t know, it’s the only thing I didn’t back up. And you say “That’s stupid.” I start fantasizing about hurting you, to be honest, and I get creative at it too.
aaaawwwwwww SUX!!! The last time I had a crashing laptop I lost hundreds of pictures that I didn’ thave saved anywhere else.
I have 3 external drives on which I back up my computer: 400GB drive, an 800GB drive, and a 120GB portable. Some may consider it overkill, but if/when my computer crashes, I’ll have the last laugh.
look at the bright side ,, only one drive died
Alright, there are means of retrieving the date you know, unless a hard drive is blown to a gazillion pieces by an atomic bomb, data from it can still be retrieved, and if this file is very important to you and if you’re willing to pay some money to get it retrieved i can hook you up with someone who can probably help you out with it.<br />contact me if you’re interseted.<br />
So why you didn’t back it up?<br /><br />hahaha..<br /><br />I am joking.. allah be3eenik.. one time I was coding an assignment.. it had 4 or 5 files interconnected.. I didn’t have a backup and stupid me was trying to remove extra files by their extension using Unix command line of course.. and lord be hold my stupidness and lack of sleep.. I deleted all the file.. so what did I do? <br /><br />I wrote out code for 4 or 5 files within 2 hours. How you might ask? The moment of despair, anger, killing my self has forced my brain to remember every bit of code I have written to the point that I re-wrote it better than the first time with no errors. <br /><br />The power of the mind and persistance is amazing sometimes.. No wonder people say it is best to work under pressure.. your brain power and memory works in mysterious ways due to the increase of adrelanine and anger! :) <br />
Um… I don’t think the phrase "I turn tricks…" means what you think it means. You might want to change it to "I play tricks on myself." <br /><br />Smart advice, by the way, to not save to C!<br />
I know Rebecca :) It was an intentional pun.
<p>I bet you those who told you it’s stupid don’t even backup most of their work, so just ignore them!</p>
<p>I hope you’ll manage to meet the deadlines and do a good job with it :)</p>
<p>Good luck tololy</p>
Actually, I don’t bother with what happened before. Start working on it again, you can do it you know. This is only a minor setback, vanqish it instead of wallowing ;)<br />
One time I (or, rather, my laptop) suffered a catastrophic error, deleting every non-application on the drive: music, pics, vids, and all those words. I had almost everything backed up… almost. The very seedling of a new story had been wiped out before it could get a chance to grow, and I was never quite able to recapture it. <br /><br />So, yeah, I totally feel for you.<br />
Try to use recovery software from format to retrieve your lost data.. I would recommend sme but need to investigate software names first. it is doable..
I liked the pun :)<br /><br />I can recommend a particular recovery software (spinrite) for hard-drives. <br /><br />I think the fixer guy is just lazy ;)<br />
I feel with you! I’ve had my computer AND laptop crash at the same time lately. Fortunately, I acted fast and backed everything up -in between crashes- the hard way: I burnt all my data, on *CDs*, imagine all the fuss with a dozen of GBs.