Save your photos! NOW!

My PC is in the shop. Still. After erasing my hard drive, doing a restore and returning it back to us, we found it's still not working right. We returned the PC back to Best Buy, told them it's been through rehab and now needs to be hospitalized at the lab.

But I wasn't too worried, because I had used my new Black Friday purchase six weeks ago to backup all my emails and a few of the files in My Documents. Plus, I had most of my folders backed up on my Maxtor external hard drive (80gb) about a year ago.

The biggest possible loss would have been two critical files - my financial spreadsheet which I had just completed for 2007 so we can do our taxes, and my password spreadsheet which is where I track every single website's user name and password, registration numbers for appliances, and all other important information.

Good news first - financial spreadsheet - for some unknown reason I've decided to email it to myself, JUST IN CASE.

Password sheet - I have the last version of it on my laptop and only lost three months worth of registrations. Sucks, because I just registered our kitchen appliances and got warranties for them.

Photos.

Yeah, millions of photos. From 1999 through this year. Okay, where was I supposed to have them again? Oh, Maxtor. No problem, let's connect the Maxtor to my laptop and get it all saved into my other Black Friday purchase (MyBook 500 GB).

About that...

Maxtor (80GB) is dead. Kaput. No longer working. Worked fine two months ago. Now is dead.

Do I have another backup of photos? Sure, I have CD's that I made a couple of years ago. But this still means I've lost a tremendous amount of photos.

Thankfully, I married a computer geek. He took an old PC apart, broke the Maxtor to its components. Reconnected the Maxtor with new cables. Connected my new WD Black Friday purchase to the US drive, and we began the process of saving everything from the broken Maxtor to the new WD.

48 freaking hours later, it finally finished backing up 80GB worth of files. (Did I mention it was an old PC we used?).

Now, I have two external hard drives hooked to my laptop - WD (160gb) and MyBook (500gb), as I transfer everything to MyBook.

I still don't know the extent of my loss. I've uploaded a lot of photos to the website, so I do have a means to bring back most of my stuff. But that's going to take a considerable amount of time to do.

What I do know - next time I make a purchase on Black Friday, it's going to come out of the box the following day, and used within a week. No more procrastination.

Lessons learned - save your photos NOW. Use CD's. Don't trust those external hard drives.

I'm not taking a break

I was forced to take a break.

You all remember my room with all the papers scattered around?

Three weekends ago we went to IKEA and bought two filing cabinets for all those papers. But here's the problem with IKEA - you go in for one thing, and you end up with something different. We ended up with a major plan of reorganizing the house furniture.

Two cabinets from the computer room had to be moved, computer table had to be moved, filing cabinets needed to be assembled, papers filed, etc.

Did you all catch the part about "computer table had to be moved"?

Yeah, it weighs a ton. So computer needed to be dehooked and rehooked in the new location. But in my zealousness for cleaning two weekends ago, and in my husband's eagerness to show me all the dust everywhere, he pointed to the dusty cover on my PC. Then he decided he needed to check how much dust is INSIDE the PC.

Needless to say, it was dusty. Very.

And what do you know, I had a can of compressed air used to clean keyboards, so why not use it?! Like Adam and Eve, I gave him the apple. He ate it. Computer innards were spotlessly clean when he was done with that can.

Then it was time to reconnnect the cables and boot the PC.

Yeah, you guessed it, $189 and two weekends later I still have no PC and Best Buy is making a study case of my PC. All their diagnostics indicate hard drive is perfectly fine. Problem is you can't reboot the darn thing!

Mind you, this is the PC I got a year ago because the previous one passed away while still on warranty. I paid $199 for this PC. Actually, no, I paid nothing for it. I paid $199 for a 2-year warranty. Which is wonderful, except that...ok, ask me when was the last time I backed up the information on that PC [not recently], and ask me how much it costs for a lab to backup your hard drive [$500].

Oh forget it, don't ask. I'm depressed as is.

Didn't get anything for my birthday. Yes, you all read that right. I got NOTHING. I did get a ton of phone calls and wishes from people I haven't heard from in a long time, and that definitely made me happy. Plus everyone's posts on my blog! That was awesome. You guys rock. But I got no presents. Did I mention I'm married? Yeah, he didn't forget my birthday, he just didn't get me anything for it.

I was almost ready to get the divorce papers signed on Valentine's Day. But 12 roses did magically appear on the dining room table behind my laptop.

I apologise for the lack of drawing on this post. My father's drawings are in another email account and once I log on to that account it logs me off blogger. Which sucks and aggravates the hell out of me. That's also the reason I often opt not to blog. It's just too much effort to log on to a different account just to blog. I wish they made it a bit simpler where it wasn't linked to an email account.

Done ranting. For now.

Sunset of my 30's

Last birthday of my 30's! Today is going to be a fantastic day. While everyone else calls it Super Tuesday or Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras - I'm celebrating 39 years of breathing air. As a special treat for someone born in 69, I get 69 farenheit outside in the weather forecast! This has got to be the warmest birthday I've ever had on the northern hemisphere (I have to state that because two years ago I spent a warmer birthday in the southern hemisphere).

Last decade I wasn't as thrilled about finishing my 20's. But I'm very excited about reaching 40 next year. It'll give me reason to tell people to stop calling me "sweety" or pat me on the head as if I was a teenager.

In celebration of my birthday my PC cr@pped out on me. It's in the shop now (thank dog for warranties!).

I better get some work done. Apparently, they don't give a day off for birthday.

Sucks!