Wednesday morning I taught class, closed my macbook with word still open to my lesson plan, went to lunch with a friend and then headed down to the library to work. I got to my desk, took my computer out and opened it back up. I hit firefox to open it up and quit Word. And then the world STOPPED. My computer froze, trying to quit Word and I had to manually restart it. Only it didn't restart. It made funny clicky noises and a big question mark showed up in the middle of the screen. I might not be a big science / math / programmer type, but I know enough about computers (and macs in particular) to know that that is BAD. SUPER BAD. I ran to my friend's office and told her what had happened and she (being an amazing, awesome person and friend) dropped everything and drove me to the nearest apple store.
I spent 4.5 hours in the apple store, waiting for someone to see me. They are appointment-only so I had to wait to see if they could either get ahead of schedule or if someone would miss their appointment. By the time I saw someone I had befriended most of the people in the store and knew (ok, I was about 85% sure before I even walked in there that it was probably worst case scenario) that it was dead and gone. Sure enough the harddrive is dead, and the likelyhood that data will be recovered is practically zilch. (Although a friend's husband, who does that sort of thing for a living is looking at it... he's my last hope, and I have little of that left.)
So, here's the really bad part. The sheer-idiocy that a relatively bright person, working on their PhD can display is sometimes mind-boggling: I have NO back ups. 3 years of graduate school, poof. Fortunately I have some things, but not the most recent things, because of emails that I sent either myself or professors on occasion. But it's definitely NOT everything and NOT the article I've been revamping for the past month. And of course, photos, music, etc. Most of the photos of knitting related stuff is on flickr, and a lot of photos with friends are on facebook. But it's the ridiculous amount of work lost that absolutely kills me. If it had been another year or two, and I were 1/2 way through my dissertation or something, that would have pretty much ended my career I think.
Oh, and did I mention it was 9 days past warranty? Back up, people, learn from my mistakes! I did end up with a shiny new computer (mostly thanks to my amazingly generous parents) and I decided that investing in "mobileme" which automatically backs up to an online server so that I can access my harddrive from pretty much anywhere in the world was well worth the extra $$. 'Cause you can be SURE that I won't lose that much info ever again.
2 comments:
Oh no! What a nightmare! That's everyone's worst fear, isn't it? Thankfully, I learned from someone else's mistake last week and backed everything up then. Whew!
Yikes! That is so depressing. I'm glad you didn't lose all. If it is any consolation, a friend's macbook pro did the same thing last week. Maybe the stars are mis-aligned for Macs right now.
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