The hard drive on the old computer died a wrenching, violent death yesterday. The one with my project on it. My newly completed project. Panic ensued. I cried. I screamed. Desperate calls were made to assorted and sundry computer geek types. I made Kevin jump out of my way with a fearful look on his face as I paced the entire house with the phone in my hand. The first geek to actually call back won the privilege of attempting data recovery.

Shawn, my new best friend, arrives ~2:30 this afternoon. He tells me there's about a 40% chance of getting anything off of the drive. I still love him. He actually comes to my house for no extra charge. I don't have to wait a week for my usual repair shop to get a chance to even look at it and charge me through the nose for them to tell me that the hard drive is hosed. I know that already.

The panic subsided long enough for me to check the new laptop, onto which I moved a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago. I was relieved to discover that I did that after all the papers were edited and laid out. They don't have the final corrections incorporated, but at least I have that much. And I have copies of all the figures and equations, and backup copies of the replacement figures two of the authors sent. It would take only about six hours of work to reconstruct what I lost, should the need arise. Still, it would be better to just be able to recover the completed files. And the OSU alumni logo I worked on all Saturday morning. And my archived e-mail (although I might have most of that on a backup disk somewhere).

You can be sure that I'll be religiously following a very strict backup schedule from now on.
- posted by Lori @ 4:32:00 PM | permanent link | |