I stared at the blank screen.
I rebooted the computer and watched as the revolving circle continued to spin before the page went blank once again – rebooting again and again, each time hoping the computer would magically start.
My heart sank. This was the horror story I heard so many others talk about; the fear of those who work computers.
My hard drive had crashed!!
My mind raced as I thought of all of my documents, pictures and programs.
Why hadn’t I invested in a backup program? How could I have been so careless? We always think it only happens to others.
I texted my tech savvy husband to tell him I thought my hard drive had crashed and he encouraged me to think positive, but once he arrived home and took a look for himself I could tell I had been correct.
He was hopeful however because the portable hard drive I had used to transfer some pictures from an old laptop was still plugged into the tower. “When did you make your last backup on the portable hard drive?” he asked? I had to admit the answer was … never. As a matter of fact the truth was I didn’t even know how to do it.
“Maybe all is not lost” he said as he tried to buoy my spirits. There was still a chance some of my data could be recovered.
The next day he went to one of those famous electronics stores and bought a hard drive for the computer. That evening he installed the hard drive, loaded the recovery disk and rebooted the computer. Nothing. Nada. The computer would begin to reboot but seemed to get stuck at a certain point and begin the whole process again.
I thought again of all of the pictures I had saved of family and projects, ideas I had jotted down, and posts I had already created. It was hard to stay positive.
Not one to give up, my husband called the support team for our computer company and spent nearly four hours on a Saturday working with them to solve the problem. They felt we had an incorrect recovery disk and would overnight one to us. Once the disk arrived it he inserted it into the computer and again tried to reboot. Again – nothing.
Again I was discouraged.
There was one bit of good news however. The portable hard drive had backed up the computer at one time. My husband had had the good sense to set the drive to do automatic backups periodically and I had had the good fortune to leave the portable hard drive plugged in once I had finished loading the pictures; so just possibly some of my data had been saved. But I couldn’t be sure which files and how many.
In the long run, after an additional call to computer support, we discovered the hard drive purchased from the electronics store wouldn’t work as the computer company has created a “blurp” in the recovery software that will only allow it to run on hard drives provided by them. Irritating yes, but at this point we just wanted to do whatever it took to get the computer up and running as it had now been down for over three weeks.
Once their new hard drive arrived, we inserted the recovery disk. Thankfully the process began, and we discovered that nearly all of my files could be restored. While many of the programs had to be reinstalled, all in all, the situation turned out nearly as well as it could have.
I now have a portable hard drive plugged in, and for even further protection I have purchased a backup system that stores my data in the “cloud.”
I hope it never happens again, but if it does, I can sleep better knowing I am now protected from the stress of losing all of my files.
Lesson learned.
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