Week of Disasters

Ok, first of all, I should be ashamed of myself. I was using an external HD more than I should have been - i.e., as a working drive and not backup storage as it should have been. It started acting wonky a few weeks ago, and did I leap up and back up all the files (all 300G+ of them?) NO. I did not.

So you know what happened next - actually, let me digress for a moment.

I decided on Sunday that I needed to shake things up a bit. Recalling back to the days when I used to clean and change my bedroom around all the time, and how cool and new everything felt, and how creative and inspired I felt after I did it. Now I know it's moving around the "chi" that causes that feeling!

Anyway, so I'm working on a few things Sunday morning, drive is working fine. I shut down my PC to start Operation Clean Office. 8 hours later I plug my PC back in, plug the HD into the USB drive, and....nothing. I can clearly hear the disk isn't powering up. Just a few faint clicks. And then my panic attack begins. Along with the worst case of self-loathing imaginable. I am smarter than this. I am more tech-savvy than this. I just plain KNOW BETTER. And yet...all is lost.

Or not. I have solicited the (very costly) services of a data recovery facility. Shipped the HD off yesterday and am tracking it via UPS like it's my own child. I am sick. And sad. And miserable. I feel like a limb has been amputated. Every digital photo I've ever taken is on that drive. Every file, every scan, every work product. See what I mean about how stupid I was?

I don't care the cost, I am just hoping, praying, pleading that this data recovery process will work. The HD has been delivered - now I wait for the prognosis from the engineer. As HD failures go, this one wasn't awful. No horrid noises (i.e. the sounds of the disks being destroyed) or anything. Mr. RedFish thinks it's mechanical failure (i.e. the read/write head) rather than sector/disk damage. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE.

It's been a rough few weeks for odd things like this. First, our Garmin GPS unit stopped working while we were in PA for Thanksgiving. It was fine one minute, then we picked up my brother and his gf, and got back in the car, and nothing. Luckily, it was still under warranty, so we sent it back to be repaired.

Then my external HD. Oh, before that, my iPhone froze up and I had to restore it back to factory settings, which wiped out all my saved voicemails and pictures. It wasn't catastrophic like the HD collapse, but it was annoying.

I'm getting to the point where I don't want to touch anything electronic!

BUT..in what I am reading as omens of changing fortunes, good things started happening yesterday after the data recovery people got back to me so quickly (within an hour of my SOS call). The new Garmin arrived via UPS. They replaced our old one instead of repairing it. Then, I opened a program on my PC and found a cached version of one of the lost files. A major one, too. So that made me feel good...at least I have one.

So the upshot of the office rearranging is that I emptied out some drawers, gathered almost two boxfuls of stuff to get rid of, am on the way to finding more. The downside is the spare bedroom is a mess again, because I had to move stuff somewhere. I also miss my old behemoth of a desk more than I realized I would. But it's just an adjustment period, I guess. Less space is frustrating to me right now, but the point is to downsize. I shouldn't need a ton of crap on my desk to work....minimalize! (Is that even a word?).

I also found another foot-high stack of ripped magazine pages in the bottom drawer of one of my storage units. I thought it was all recipes/food, but turns out it isn't. Which is good in one way, because I can get rid of it. Bad, in another, because now I have to go through it! The fun never ends.....lucky for me, just a little work to do now and snow on the way. With my tight budget (what Christmas shopping?) and the cold weather, I have no excuse for not cranking this stuff out. If only I were writing or doing something that would make me money...

I just really want my files back from that hard drive. Then I can get back on track (with backups securely in place)