Computer Woes

A computer crash. It's never going to happen to you. I mean, you have a fairly new computer, you have a virus checker, and you don't download weird files from the internet. It's all safe, you think, right?

Not quite. Janelle and I experienced a complete hard drive failure last week, and literally lost everything. We thought that we were doing things right, and nothing like it had happened to us before, so we thought we were safe. We knew that we wanted to save some important things on CD for safe-keeping, but it wasn't important enough for us ever to get around to it. That was a mistake!

We lost everything--all of our digital pictures from the past year and a half; all of Janelle's graduate work (literally hundreds of hours of papers, powerpoints, and spreadsheets); and just everthing else we had saved on our computer--music, programs, resumes, and more.

For a few days following the traumatic experience, we were simply in a state of shock and disbelief--how could this have happened to us! Luckily, we have hard copies of most of Janelle's graduate work(which we will have to scan back into the computer or retype--but at least we have it), but it's all the pictures that we lost that caught us most off-guard. We'd had our digital camera for just over a year, and every picture was saved on that hard drive. We had printed off a few-maybe 2% of them-and had a few that we could get back from sending them to friends-maybe another 8% of them-but the other 90% are gone for good. They have simply ceased to exist.

These were our pictures of holidays, birthdays, special events; our trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon (so many good pictures-that are now only a memory); or our pictures from the 5 weddings we went to this summer (Drew&Lisa's, Nate&Jessica's, Jeff&Justine's, Tiffany&Gary's, and Barrett&Suzanne's); and my trips to Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, 4 Corners, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Chicago. I still can't believe that they are gone.

After purchasing the new hard drive, we have been able to fix our computer, thanks to our friend Mait, who is a computer whiz, but it seems to be only a shell of what it was. We had to start from scratch again. Oddly enough the only good thing to happen with all this is that our computer runs much faster again! And we now have a 60gig hard drive, versus a 40gig that we had before. Granted much of that space was never used to begin with!

So the moral of the story is: Save early and often, and you will not be sad when the piece of junk crashes.