Posted in Family Life

Oh woe was I over this past weekend. 

On Saturday morning one of our computers would not start up properly.  Hubby didn't have time for these sort of dilemmas as he was heading off to school to get some reporting done.  It's a horribly busy time of the year for school teachers. (Our school year ends in December in Australia). 

After a quick check of the situation, an electrical burning smell coming from one of the hard drives indicated a failed hard drive.  There's three internal hard drives in this computer and hubby's quick glance said it was C drive. 

Despite being a pain, a hard drive was ordered and collected on Hubby's way home from work.  Easy.  Fixed. 

Now you have to understand.  We designed our set up so that we store nothing important, other than software applications and the normal Windowsy stuff, on that drive.  Hubby assured me that when a hard drive goes it's usually that one so it's wise not to store anything, that you wouldn't want to lose, on it.  And in the past, this has certainly been the case.  It's always C drive and the other two drives, in my mind, were safe locations.

In the evening hubby returned home with our brand spanking new hard drive and went to begin the process of formatting and reinstalling all of our software.  Painful but necessary and not the first time we've had to do it. 

Within moments of beginning the process he discovered that when he had glanced at the computer in the morning he had mistaken the hard drive as C, when in fact it was F. 

Now this means nothing to you, I know.  But it means the whole world to me.  F is where I store EVERYTHING.  The supposed "safe" drive.   Photos, ebooks, homeschool journals, curriculum...EVERYTHING important to a person on F drive. 

What about the back up, as all wise people know that they should have a back up?!!!  Well yes, I wasn't too panicked at that point as we do have a back up.  It's one of those whizz bang external backs up that does the deed by itself everyday in the background. 

But a back up system is only as good as the person setting it up.  Here in lay our problem.  Somewhere along the line there has been a communication break down.  I'm sure I would have said, "I need my photos, homeschool resources and journals backed up".  Perhaps hubby has only heard a portion of this...thankfully it was photos that he heard.  We're thinking the other issue at the time may have been the size of my homeschool resources file.  It may have been intentionally left out due to lack of space on our back up system.   The plan may have been to purchase another drive or a bigger one.  But whatever the plan was it never happened and we slipped into the content notion that our files were safe. 

....Until the big crash of 09...yes it shall forever be known as this.


Bye bye almost everything.  Woe was me.  Woe woe was me!!  It's hard to fathom how much stuff has just disappeared into the depth of that clunky piece of metal.  

On Saturday night I hit the net in search of a solution.  Surely it could be fixed.  And yes there are two options.  One is to replace the circuit board on it.  Seemingly easy enough IF you can find the identical board.  And I mean IDENTICAL.  Every number and detail on the hard drive has to be identical or it will not work and that's like searching for a needle in an immense haystack.  It's also hit and miss.  I tried for several hours to hunt one down but gave that up as the futile search of a desperate woman. 

The other option is to pay a data recovery service who restore data for a living.  Sounds like the perfect solution.  Well the fact that they don't advertise prices on their websites worried me.  And then I found a budget service that charged $900 minimum for our sort of hard drive failure.  Hmmm...how much is my information worth??  A thousand dollars???  Oh I thought about it.  I yearned for it.  But...I resolved myself to the fact that it was gone...oh so gone. 

Since then I have spent hours emailing companies who I've purchased ebooks from and asking them (feel free to refer to it as begging) to reactive download links for me.  I've only heard back from a few so far and all of them have said yes.  Currclick is BRILLIANT as their links remain without an expiry time or limit to the number of downloads (except for a handful of items).  From now on if I have a choice between Currclick and another company with the same product, Currclick gets my money!! 

So where was the silver lining in my weekend.  There's always good in dark patches.  Well the photos were saved; companies have been very generous in reactivating links that expired up to two years ago; I've managed to piece together a lot of files from the old dvd/cd back ups; I got to do a thorough decluttering of all of my files and now they are nice and organised; AND for the most significant silver lining...I got my first grey hair...and guess what?  It wasn't the end of the world either.