As you can guess from the title of the article there has been a recent opportunity to really learn the importance of backups. See when I last reported to you I had been happily going about my business doing this and that. Making site changes here and there and generally testing out different stuff and having a good time doing it. I was even about ready to create some new pieces of artwork and many more exciting things.
Thus it was a Friday afternoon.I came home from work all excited to be home at an early hour with the prospect of much time to be spent that weekend working on things online. From playing a game or two to testing additional things and writing an article or two. Alas, it was not to be. I turned on my desktop computer while on the phone and then a few moments later noticed that it was desperately trying to book from DHCP. Not good.
I spent a fair enough amount of time working with it to determine that as far as the computer was concerned the hard drive did not exist. So the computer is about a year old. I got it last December. So it should still be under warranty. YES! It is/was. In fact it turns out I have a 3 year warranty on it. So the Friday afternoon call to HP for a new hard drive was not as awful as my call last year or earlier this year, about a stupid screw for a laptop harddrive. This was reasonablly not painful.
I proceeded to spend the rest of the evening mourning my hard drive and data. The next day I marched myself out and purchased a 1TB external hard drive for backup purposes. I can use it on my laptop and desktop and even and older desktop that needs cleaning and disposal. I spent a good part of the rest of the day and the next getting my laptop backup up to it.
I was surprised to find on the following Monday that my drive had been delivered. It was after all Columbus Day and while I was working many other places do close. I went straight home after work to get the drive and start reviving my computer.
That’s all the good stuff. When the drive failed I lost several gigs of legally downloaded and purchased music. I also lost some original artwork I had done. Stuff for a client that is working on a site. It was the final and original logo art. Ugh. I could have sworn that I had given her a copy of it when she went to the printers for her business cards. So I called her. No. She looked around and couldn’t find it. Well, I have jpg’s of it I’ll just have to rebuild the Illustrator files. Ugh.
So I work to get the computer loaded only to run into problems with Internet Explorer. It won’t launch. When I finally get it to launch and can download Firefox I find Firefox is working fine. Maybe there was a glitch as it was loading. So I started over. It takes me longer to get to the point to find out that I will be able to retrieve some of the music, than I prefer. I do however get to that point.
I am finally back up and running with all the software loaded that I had had loaded. I’m starting to get things back to normal. I still need to setup the external drive on the desktop so I can start using it. I haven’t started pulling in the music again. This is going to take a long time. And we got really lucky. The printer still had the disk with the art and I’ll be able to make a file of just the logo all broken out to label and such much easier.
If I’d had a backup, I wouldn’t have all this work to do. I would have recovered much quicker as far as files for art and music. I wouldn’t have spent several hours feeling really stupid because I didn’t have copies of the important stuff.
Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.
