Hard drive disaster

Pauline, Kim and I had a lovely time at our first crop night together last Friday night. I was going to upload a post telling you all about it but my PC seemed sadly slow and out of sorts on Saturday and by Sunday afternoon the hard drive had snuffed it!

At least it warned me though - a screen appeared stating that my hard drive had a problem and to back up immediately! I found a set of disks I had bought to back up my photos on ( I purchased them months ago but of course, hadn't done it)  and started off with that when the disk popped out of the drive and told me I would need more than 10 of that type of disc and their inbuilt software wasn't designed to cope witth such a large number so that was that. I then asked Sam if he had anything I could back up my documents on as I had found a new 2 GB pendrive in my office and was going to use that but thought it may not be enough ( ha ha, who was i kidding ) and he told me that he hasd used my other pen drive but it was broken, and then he had lost it!!!!

By now I was starting to panic ever so slightly as this seemed like a horrible rerun of what had happened to me last year when my old hard drive had died and I had consequently lost TWO YEARS OF PHOTOS! As I was starting to panic I also realised that several of my ebay auctions would end in a few hours so I logged on to check out how they were going and up came the warning again and then  - a black blank screen -  a blue blank screen - and then nothing - my hard drive just shut down! AAAAGGGGGHHHHH! NOT AGAIN!

So after I had run around the house like a headless chook for about 10 minutes or so wondering what I was going to do I realised that this PC must still be under warranty so I unplugged it all on Monday morning and sent Adam off to deliver it to the computer shop next door to his office to get fixed. Adam hates doing stuff like this as his knowledge of computers would easily fit on the head of a pin with plenty of room for a pool and a pony, so I knew exactly what would happen when I rang him on Monday afternoon to check if everything was OK. He walked out of his office door, with me on the phone, into the computer store and handed the phone to Huw! Happily Huw reassured me that everything would be fine and my bigger, fatter, lovelier hard drive is back where it belongs, photos, and documents all intact - phew - and I can hear the gentle hum of my NEW portable hard drive backing up all my photo and document files as i type.

So let this be a warning to anyone who hasn't backed up their stuff for a while, that wonderful pieces of technology though they are, your hard drive IS NOT indestructible and WILL NOT last forever, so BACK UP, BACK UP and BACK UP again so those treasured memories and documents will not be lost!

I'll put up info and photos of our Friday night crop next posting!