After the Crash!

Well the people who worked on my crashed Mac iBook G4 returned it to me with most of my programs on it, but with small things missing, like the Spell Checker in Word. Not really such a small thing, as I type quickly and need the backup. There were, however, no documents pictures or other data!

When I went into Finder and found everything empty, I couldn't believe it! I felt shaky. I started to enumerate all that I no longer had - pictures, and poetry, and saved pdf downloads, and all my documents from teaching materials to business records. I was not happy.

I called the people who had replaced my fried drive and I think I sounded quite pathetic as I begged them to see if there wasn't at least some data. They asked if I had back-ups; I confessed to being stupid. They said they'd try again, but it would take a long time. The other option was to send the fried drive to a lab and pay a couple of thousand dollars. I said I'd wait to see what they could do, and not to send it to the lab ('cause no way was I paying $2000.00, even if I had been really, really stupid.)

I ignored documents and data for a couple of days, just doing web work, and re-configuring what I needed to do that. Then, when I was looking for something else, I discovered a cache of backups from 2004. (I'm really bad with organizing material objects - I'm much better at organizing files, - and I will get in the habit of backing them up!)

So I took my 2004 CDs, which I hadn't made, but a technician had made them at the school where I worked when my assignment changed and I'd had to move from an IBM laptop to a Mac. (I wouldn't want you to think I used to be smart; someone else had done it for me.)

By that time, I was grateful to have anything. I dragged the files that were still useful over onto my new hard drive and began to put my external brain together again. And began to face the idea of re-creating work I had already done and lost. (Stupid! Stupid! Stooped!)

Today, I rewrote a consulting report on a website, and I think I actually improved it because I changed the structure and made it problem - suggested solution, problem - suggested solution rather than the more traditional business structure with all the recommendations at the end. This structure will be easier, I think, for the website owner to understand & implement.

Then - a reward for the virtues of acceptance and rewriting - the people with my fried drive called and said they got some of the document files off it. Tomorrow, I find out what has been returned to me. And I promise, promise, promise to back-up daily!