April 08, 2009

Offline

I was just talking the other night to a friend about how dependent on my computer I've become.

It's how I correspond with friends. It's where I do my writing. It's where I look at the photos I take.

I go to the computer to look up interesting facts that I can't quite remember. I use the computer to interact with colleagues when planning conference presentations. It's often where I read the news or find out about current events.

And everything is on my computer: my writing, my teaching stuff, my photos, my address book. Some of that stuff is backed up on an external hard drive; some of it isn't.

Many of you will understand the feeling of panic I had yesterday when I opened my laptop and found myself staring at a blank screen. None of the tips the tech support guy gave me over the phone worked. Instead, I had to drop the computer off at the shop; I'm waiting now to hear whether or not I lost everything on the hard drive.

In the meantime, I'll be taking a little vacation from the internet. And keeping my fingers crossed.

14 comments:

Dorcas (aka SingingOwl) said...

YOW! Note to self: Must buy CDs and copy stuff a.s.a.p.

I hope it is all recoverable!

Unknown said...

*praying* to the computer gods.

Rick said...

Aw, I'm terribly sorry to hear that! That happened to me last year in February. I opened my computer in my dorm room to start the work I had to do that day and Finder is frozen. I thought nothing of it, so I restarted to make things all better. When it did restart, I didn't see the Apple logo. I saw a flashing finder folder with a question mark on the front. A sure sign of a complete hard drive failure and inability to boot a startup disk. So I lost everything then, nothing was backed up. Nowadays, I have a larger hard drive and I make regular backups of everything, except my photos (this scares me, but I don't want to take up 13GB of more space), on a friends hard drive. Definitely, back up everything in the future. I'm lucky I learned early on and on my first computer. Good luck with recovery! :)

Rana said...

Oh, fingers crossed!

The ability to use Time Machine (a wireless auto-back-up set-up) was one of the best things about this new computer - SO much better having that peace of mind!

Anonymous said...

Oh no, I hope it's all ok. I'll pray to the computer gods (also known as Tech Support) too.

Unknown said...

Miss you!

Joy said...

OH! Best wishes and so sorry to hear of this. Unbelievable how computers have come to mean so much.

Speedy recovery to Mr. Laptop!

Jennifer said...

Ack! Hope all is well. This recently happened to me - the whole harddrive is shot PLUS the actual box and wires laptop is dead too. That goodness I'm married to an IT guy who set me up with an "idiot-proof" back-up system. It was, indeed, idiot proof.

Jennifer said...

Thank goodness, even.

landismom said...

Good luck!

I had a recent laptop problem, and commented to my dh that I couldn't survive without my laptop for 12 hours. He looked at me deadpan and said, "no, you sure couldn't."

Ouch. Might be time to get offline this weekend, myself.

Rev Dr Mom said...

omg...my hard drive died this morning. I am bereft--I'm on the Kid's computer now, (and grateful for that, but still...)

I am afraid that I've lost all my pictures of Baby J. Breaks my heart. And it's my own fault, b/c even after I lost my hd last year, I didn't back things up as I should.

kathy a. said...

aaack! hope it can be restored.

i ran out and got an external backup drive when my idiot computer started acting up. and discs were not enough to contain the fullness of my computer. but, of course have not been backing up regularly since....

JMKH said...

I just had my laptop repaired--it took about a month to figure out the problem and find the right place for the repair work. I feel your pain.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Hope it's OK! I've been spending a LOT of time off the computer at my retreat--no computer there yet, but lots of work to do. Do come stay. (You can bring the computer when it's fixed.)