I was in the middle of writing my Christmas letter when my hard drive crashed. I do mean “CRASHED”. I was afraid I had lost everything, but Daryl used a couple of programs and was able to recover most of my important stuff. The biggest success was finding, recovering and re-importing my Thunderbird address list. There were several corrupted segments on my drive, but we were able to piece together most of the files to get me going on my new drive. It’s been a couple of days, but I am up and running again. (I have been doing webmail since Thursday on my work laptop that I bring home. But it’s just not the same!)
I put up some outside Christmas lights today, and I’m quite proud of myself. It’s the first time since Roland’s been gone that I have done this. I just did a string across the eaves and around the arches, but I feel festive! Now I have to finish decorating my tree and then baking time will be upon me.
Tomorrow is Carrie’s birthday and I’m taking dinner and cake out to them. They are still so deep in unpacking that they didn’t want to stop long enough to drive to my house. So happy birthday, Carrie. And happy birthday, Don, on Monday.
By the way, I’m going to see “Narnia” tomorrow morning. Anyone else seen it yet?
Thanks for the birthday wish. I don’t see many movies in theaters but Narnia is one I want to see there. Just don’t tell me how it ends. 😉
I had the failed hard drive experience several months ago so I feel for you. Fortunately I had purchased an external hard drive and had set up an automatic daily backup of my entire system to it every night. All my data was there, but still no fun to restore.
I decided to up my protection an additional step and purchased a whole new system instead of just replacing the drive. My system was getting old by then and it was time. Also, given the fact that our computer rides down the road in our trailer while we travel, it is subjected to more physical abuse than most.
My new system has RAID 1 (mirrored) disk drives. This means there are two drives with the same data on them. Unless both fail at the same time (very unlikely) I should be protected. In addition, I still backup everything to the external hard drive every night. I keep a MWF cycle, a TThSa cycle and a Sunday cycle. I have found this works pretty well. There have been several occasions when I have recovered a file from the backups, usually after doing something stupid.
I’ll add my wishes to a happy birthday to Don.
I won’t tell you how it ends, 😉 but I will warn you not to walk out when the credits start. The movie isn’t over. There’s another scene.
It followed the book very closely. Very well done, but certainly no LOTR.
Richard,
What program to you use to do the automatic backups? I need something like that.
I need to back up to Don or Ann’s computer. My computer sounds like a continuous pong game! Very annoying. I don’t want it to die as I’m doing income taxes.
Daryl — I am using Retrospect. It came bundled with my external hard drive. Seems to work fine.
What’s the fright factor of Narnia? It looks a little intense for young children. Especially one as sensitive to scary images as Megan is. What do you think?
No, I would not take Megan to see Narnia. It has some pretty intense battle scenes that she wouldn’t like at all, and many depictions of the White Witch’s vengeance could be frightening.