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excitement i could live without
So I went after work today to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrshamill's, for computer surgery. There's a long dreary story involving laptop hard drive interfaces, but ultimately here we were with all the right pieces, and we put the new HD in the computer to load the OS and slaved the old HD to a computer she's working on to move all the data over to its HD, whence we can then move it to the new HD.
Some stuff won't copy, and of course then the thing gives up rather than just move everything else. Fine, we'll do it one folder at a time.
The computer-in-progress keeps crashing.
Maybe we'll start with the music, because that'll take the most time.
We can't find the music. It hasn't already been moved, but it's nowhere to be found on the old HD.
The computer-in-progress keeps crashing.
Finally we say fuck it and take the old HD upstairs to slave it to MrHamill's computer, which does not crash.
Still can't find any of my stuff. Music, documents, pictures -- none of it. Can't find where it's supposed to be. It's no place.
I begin to feel ill.
We look everywhere at least three times, and I feel sicker by the minute as more and more things occur to me that I may have lost irretrievably. The music would just be a lot of work to get back into iTunes -- I mean a LOT of work, but there's little if any of it I don't have on a CD somewhere. But -- my files. My files. I have a hard copy of my thesis, thank god, but a lot of other old papers that exist nowhere but here. I have pictures -- I begin to feel like someone whose photo album has been in a house fire. I am, unreasonably, only moderately consoled by the fact that I backed everything up to the external hard drive here on my coffee table six weeks ago. My hands begin to shake.
The only thing that seems possible to both of us, sincemrshamill insists that it's not possible the stuff is Gone given the fact that there is literally nothing wrong with the HD, is that it's in the folder that wouldn't copy on account of access was denied. We can't check, though, because access is denied. How can we get access? We have to put the old HD back in the laptop, which has now finished installing the OS. (I'm not kidding about the time all this was taking.)
We do this, and I see my background, and a .jpg file on the desktop that I hadn't put into a folder yet, and I hurry to "My Documents" and everything is there. Everything is there. I open a "Word" (actually Open Office) doc and it's whole. Nothing is the matter with any of it. It's all fine. It turns out the only thing that was possible was in fact the case, and the stuff was in a folder that without my knowledge had been marked "private".
Which was when I burst into tears.
Only for a minute, but wow, I mean, I'd seriously been preparing myself for the (again, unreasonable; see above, re: backup) idea that I'd Lost Everything, and suddenly everything was fine, and bam. Genuine bursting-into-tears, in a way I haven't done in ages.
mrshamill unlocked the folder, and we made a date for the weekend to transfer the data, because by this time it was 11:30 and even if the transfer had been instantaneous I wasn't going to get home before midnight, and I confidently expect the data transfer to take whole hours. So, Sunday.
Whew.
mrshamill's, for computer surgery. There's a long dreary story involving laptop hard drive interfaces, but ultimately here we were with all the right pieces, and we put the new HD in the computer to load the OS and slaved the old HD to a computer she's working on to move all the data over to its HD, whence we can then move it to the new HD.Some stuff won't copy, and of course then the thing gives up rather than just move everything else. Fine, we'll do it one folder at a time.
The computer-in-progress keeps crashing.
Maybe we'll start with the music, because that'll take the most time.
We can't find the music. It hasn't already been moved, but it's nowhere to be found on the old HD.
The computer-in-progress keeps crashing.
Finally we say fuck it and take the old HD upstairs to slave it to MrHamill's computer, which does not crash.
Still can't find any of my stuff. Music, documents, pictures -- none of it. Can't find where it's supposed to be. It's no place.
I begin to feel ill.
We look everywhere at least three times, and I feel sicker by the minute as more and more things occur to me that I may have lost irretrievably. The music would just be a lot of work to get back into iTunes -- I mean a LOT of work, but there's little if any of it I don't have on a CD somewhere. But -- my files. My files. I have a hard copy of my thesis, thank god, but a lot of other old papers that exist nowhere but here. I have pictures -- I begin to feel like someone whose photo album has been in a house fire. I am, unreasonably, only moderately consoled by the fact that I backed everything up to the external hard drive here on my coffee table six weeks ago. My hands begin to shake.
The only thing that seems possible to both of us, since
mrshamill insists that it's not possible the stuff is Gone given the fact that there is literally nothing wrong with the HD, is that it's in the folder that wouldn't copy on account of access was denied. We can't check, though, because access is denied. How can we get access? We have to put the old HD back in the laptop, which has now finished installing the OS. (I'm not kidding about the time all this was taking.)We do this, and I see my background, and a .jpg file on the desktop that I hadn't put into a folder yet, and I hurry to "My Documents" and everything is there. Everything is there. I open a "Word" (actually Open Office) doc and it's whole. Nothing is the matter with any of it. It's all fine. It turns out the only thing that was possible was in fact the case, and the stuff was in a folder that without my knowledge had been marked "private".
Which was when I burst into tears.
Only for a minute, but wow, I mean, I'd seriously been preparing myself for the (again, unreasonable; see above, re: backup) idea that I'd Lost Everything, and suddenly everything was fine, and bam. Genuine bursting-into-tears, in a way I haven't done in ages.
mrshamill unlocked the folder, and we made a date for the weekend to transfer the data, because by this time it was 11:30 and even if the transfer had been instantaneous I wasn't going to get home before midnight, and I confidently expect the data transfer to take whole hours. So, Sunday.Whew.
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I highly recommend external hard drives for frequent backups, you can get incredibly large ones (500 gig) for cheap nowadays (I got mine on sale for $150).
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