Back That Thing Up

Well so much for planning to post every day in March! My computer had other thoughts on that one, I guess! On Tuesday, it started acting up. It froze on me a few times and I thought maybe it just needed 'a day of rest.' So I turned it off and didn't really use it that day. Wednesday, I turned it on and it seemed to be working fine again... or so I thought. It started getting incredibly slow, and froze on me again! This repeated 2 more times before I decided to put it away for the time being.

Now, luckily I have been paranoid about my computer crashing since 2004. My freshman year my old PC pulled the "blue screen of death" on me and I thought I had lost everything. Mind you, I write my journal on my computer (and have now for 6-7 years) and at that point in time, I had no external source on which the entries were saved. When my uncle pronounced that computer dead, I thought I was done for. But miraculously, it came back to life and I was able to retrieve my data. But ever since then, it has left me uber paranoid that something could go wrong with a computer at any moment.

So now, I back up my files every month or two. As for my journal, I send myself the attached file nightly - as soon as I finish the entry. And all of my journals are on some attachment saved in a special folder in my email. My pictures are also in several places and because I back it up once every month or two, I always have *almost* all of my pictures. Same goes for the music. Those are the three most important things on my computer.

Now, back to Wednesday. I have a few 'computer nerd' friends who work with computers for a living, so I asked one of them about it and he told me he knew who could help. I was told that I probably needed to defrag and that would most likely fix the majority of my problems. So we started defragging it... but alas, the computer froze in the middle of what it was doing. Ultimately, the computer was turned off... and has not booted since.

You may wonder how I am writing this right now if my computer is still in a coma. Lucky for me, because I am such a big packrat, I have my 6-year-old PC still here with me today. Broken power source, missing keys, chipped edges, stained casing, slow-running, louder-than-a-hair-dryer, and all. I have never appreciated my Mac so much in my life.

Anyway, so my Mac was dead. It wouldn't boot. Now this is doubly problematic because (1) it is still very much a PC world (and thus most are unfamiliar with the dymanics of a Mac), and (2) Macs aren't supposed to die, so when they do... most people don't know what to do to fix it. I broke my 'facebook fast' for a day in order to post on my status that I was in desperate need of some computer help. Thank goodness for facebook - I had a friend over here within a few hours.

My uncle told me how to get to a command prompt screen and with that, Steve (the computer whiz friend) was able to start accessing my stuff. Luckily, because I back my stuff up on a regular basis, I was not stressed about losing my stuff because even if it was pronounced 'dead', I had my most important files. However, he discovered that he could mount an external drive, access certain files and folders and transfer them onto my external drive while in the command prompt setting. Awesome. So he set that up and we went our separate ways. It is still yet to be fully fixed (he's coming back again sometime today) but it will be back to normal within a day or two.

I am coming back a few hours later to finish this post and I just want to reiterate how incredibly grateful I am for my Mac!! Though it is awaiting some serious surgery, it'll pull through and will be up and running in no time. And this old PC is reminding me more and more how lucky I am to have the other computer!

Basically, this entry is to remind all of you to BACK YOUR STUFF UP. You never know when your computer will just go kaput without a moment's notice. Hopefully you won't lose any important documents in the shuffle!