So for those of you not keeping track, along with the the regular old facts of my life – child with CP, chronic illness, infertility – this year I am living in a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon. Dead cat, 3 month sickness including a hospital visit, failed adoption, plus a few behind the scenes things I haven’t been able to mention including a new medical diagnosis that I’m trying to deal with.
Then on Tuesday, catastrophic hard drive failure. My SECOND in three years. I must be sending out electric pulses or something. This one was our external hard drive, so the computer itself still functions, but it was some pretty epic data loss.
Since then I haven’t really gotten up from my computer. Losing stuff like this is a MAJOR anxiety trigger for me, completely bound up in how hard I work, my connection to the world, blah blah blah, I don’t think there’s anything that makes me freak out more than busted technology. I recognize that’s not logical, but neither is my anxiety.
Luckily, after the first hard drive failure, I started being pretty ridiculous about backing things up redundantly. So after a couple of days combing through the internet I was able to put things back together, mostly. I’ve lost all the pictures I didn’t blog between 2004 and 2007, but I’m pretty sure I blogged the best ones and that was pre-Atti, so we weren’t taking many pictures anyway. I can live with that. I’ve also lost my password to photoshop, but I found an open-source editing software called GIMP that I think will do everything I’d need to do anyway.
The music was the worst hit since that was the one area I wasn’t redundant at all. I’ve been re-uploading all my CD’s, re-downloading all my digital files, trying to remember what came from where. Stupid, time consuming, meaningless hassle that became so important to me in the middle of my panic. Bear and Atti spent the evenings playing together while I sat huddled over the keyboard like Smeagol.
The guy at Best Buy said that external hard drives usually only last three years. That seems like no time at all to me, and then I’d have to have a back up for my back up after year two. So this time I’m going to do online storage. I signed up at Dropbox and I’ve already used up my free space. If any of you want free online storage and sign up using this link, then I’ll get more free space to store my photos in. I’m really liking Dropbox, and I think this might be a good home networking solution. If everything goes in the box, then you can get to it from any computer.
So, crisis mostly recovered. But this does leave me pretty terrified considering that it’s only May.