Fortunately. VERY Fortunately!
Alrighty, since having a dead PC does me no good, I put a priority in figuring out what was wrong on Tuesday night.
Turns out I left a memory card in the USB card reader and my PC was looking for a boot sector on the card, which doesn’t have one. DUH! I rarely reboot my machine, but I will occasionally warm start it and that was the cause of all my troubles.
I had made arrangements with one of my friends to buy an external hard drive from her. She gave me a 120GB Western Digital portable drive with a case and cable for $50 smackaroos. Easy peasy. I yanked the memory card out, the PC booted properly and all was good.
You can bet your bippy I backed that sh*t up ASAP as my first set of tasks. Then I was back in business.
Lessons for you:
1) Get an external hard drive and install it right away. They are cheap. A similar model from Western Digital is currently about $90 at Amazon
. The one I got is an older model, but it was cheap and gets the job done. (I also did her a favor by taking it since it was just clutter she was trying to clean out.
2) BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER ASAP. Don’t put it off.
I got lucky here. This little scare got me off my duff. I had been looking at external drives for a while, but my analysis paralysis set in and I never ended up buying one, even though I’ve been inside a Best Buy about 5 times since February when I started thinking I needed one.
For me, I have a lot of open source or free software. If I had lost my motherboard, I’d end up buying another cheap desktop and getting MS Office pre-installed. (I really hate not having Excel, though my friend says I should use Open Office. Point taken, but I’m a total Excel junkie from doing accounting work when I was younger. I speak the language my end users speak and it’s kind of hard to make the mental switch. I mean, that’s why I hate using MS Works Spreadsheet. It’s just not as useful as Excel.) If I had lost only the hard drive, I would have gotten new boot disks and tried to recover as much as I could off the hard drive. If I had lost the fan, I would have cracked the case and asked one of my more hardware oriented friends to help me buy and install a new part. This machine is way out of warranty so I am no longer afraid of doing that. Heck. I might just do that anyway and upgrade the graphics card to something zippy.
I’ll stop with the hardcore nerding out now. The point is, $50 bucks for a hard drive is cheap for the peace of mind you get from having your files backed up. I swear, I was getting nervous about spending money because I couldn’t open Quicken to review my planned spending for the next two weeks. I was afraid I’d lose track while on vacation this weekend and overdraw my checking account.
A HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF HERE.
Back up! Save regularly! Don’t do dumb things like leave memory cards in readers when you’re rebooting!
PS- You may wish to consider helpful back up software like Norton
Vixen wrote:
Thank god for that awesome recovery.
Posted on 17-Oct-07 at 1:39 pm | Permalink
SavingDiva wrote:
I’ve been there! Luckily I did back everything up…
Posted on 17-Oct-07 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
JW Thornhill wrote:
Thank God for backups. Something very similar happened to us and if not for our backups we would have lost a lot of valuable information.
Posted on 17-Oct-07 at 3:29 pm | Permalink
dakboy wrote:
Save yourself some money and don’t buy the pre-packaged external hard drives. Pick up a regular internal drive, and an enclosure. The enclosure will run under $50, and you can get a pretty big internal drive for $100 - much larger than a pre-made $150 “external” drive would offer.
Posted on 18-Oct-07 at 8:07 am | Permalink
Dean J wrote:
If you need more than 120 gb, try here for (arguably) the best prices while still buying from a reputable company:
http://www.buy.com/cat/usb_hard_drives/16076.html
Posted on 18-Oct-07 at 9:18 am | Permalink
Jo-less wrote:
I can relate to this. We were burgled last year and my laptop was taken
Fortunately….I’d bought a new hard drive and backed up most of the data just the week before….for the first time in TWO YEARS…. I was very lucky. Now I am a little more careful about not leaving it too long between backups.
Posted on 18-Oct-07 at 11:31 am | Permalink
Brian A wrote:
Another backup solution to look at is Memeo (http://www.memeo.com). The nice thing about this is that is runs in the background and automatically backs up a file whenever it changes. It has pre-configurations to back-up things like MS Office, picture files etc… but you can configure it to back up whatever you want, like individual folders. It also can keep track of multiple versions of the same file.
Note this doesn’t create an entire disk image like Ghost does. It’s really for ensuring your critical files are always backed up the moment they change. I’ve been using it to back-up to a small NAS for about 1.5 years without any problems.
Posted on 18-Oct-07 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
Amanda wrote:
I’m glad you brought this up. I’ve been meaning to back up my data, however I’m leary about buying a cheap hard drive. I’ve got a 300GB hard drive that seems to have crashed on me sitting at home. No longer recognized by the computer after only a couple months of use! Should you backup your backup?
Posted on 18-Oct-07 at 3:28 pm | Permalink
dakboy wrote:
Yes, you should back up your backup!
Or, better yet, rotate backups. Get 2 drives. Keep one in a “safe” place that isn’t your home. Use the other for a week at home. Then switch drives - take the one that was at home to the safe place, and bring the offsite one home and use it for a week.
Yeah, it’s not always cheap. But if you’ve got a few gigs of family photos/videos that can’t ever be replaced (”baby’s first whatever” or “grandma & grandpa’s 75th wedding anniversary”), it’s worth it IMO.
Disclosure: I myself am guilty of a sloppy backup plan. I have a single external drive I use for photos and backup, but don’t back up frequently enough because my PC has a habit of crashing at really bad times (like when copying lots of data).
When I replace the computer, the 2 internal 80GB drives will get pulled out, put into enclosures, and used in a rotating backup scheme.
Posted on 18-Oct-07 at 9:06 pm | Permalink