Thursday, February 28, 2008

Twenty-four hours?? HA!

I'm mostly back. Mostly. This was a real mess. I was without a 'puter entirely for over a week, and then got it back but without any of the software that I had collected over the years, and then very shortly a CD/DVD drive that quit working again as I tried reinstalling stuff - and so I got to have the OS re-reinstalled and start over. And then the drive quit working again. We finally decided it was one particular install disk that it didn't like, and as long as I keep that disk in another room where the 'puter doesn't have to even look at it, we're okay.

So here is what I lost:
  • All my software. And in reloading things I'm finding that most of my versions were so old, I can't even reinstall and will have to upgrade.
  • All my bookmarks. Ugh.
  • All my old email. That includes folders and folders and folders of family and friend history. I thought it would be backed up but it is not.
  • All my old email ADDRESSES. That probably means YOUR email address, too. I may never get back in touch with all those people now. This really breaks my heart. Please, I'm begging you, if you are reading this, please drop me a line so I'll have your address back.
  • All my bookmarks. All of them. I have years and years of bookmarks that are gone.
  • All my saved passwords. All my financial website passwords are nuked; my eBay userIDs that I don't use very often; my various email addys which I couldn't check even by webmail from my work 'puter because I did not have the passwords.
  • There is also some stuff that I hope is still on the backup server, like all the family photos I still had on my hard drive and a couple thousand fonts I had bought a couple of years ago, but hopefully they can be recovered.
I still have some software to reinstall, like iTunes; I'm back to a really old version of Photoshop, and I'll have to buy Microsoft Office again. I also can't use my old Quickbooks anymore and am waiting on Quickbooks Pro to arrive so I can do a restore on my data.

It could be much worse, and I sure hope I have learned my lesson not to be quite so dependent upon a computer. (Probably not.)

One good thing is that I found a deal on Quickbooks Pro: Amazon has it on sale right now for about $160 with free shipping, and then if you apply coupon code BYAPSEGV, you get another twenty bucks off. It retails for $200, so that's really good. I'm thinking of upgrading the church's Quicken (even older than my Quickbooks) with this one.

3 comments:

PakAmeristanican said...

Dear oh dear oh dear. Poor you. Computers are simply not allowed to die. Hasn't anyone told them that inanimate objects are not mortal???? Aaurgh and double aaurgh.

Have you considered trying OpenOffice instead of buying Microsoft Office all over again?

I hope you manage to do some additional data recovery. In the meantime, I'm bardophile at gmail dot com

Maria Stahl said...

OpenOffice? (konks self on head) I never even thought of that! Thanks for the idea. I am going to give it a try.

Thanks for shouting out, A!

Aaron said...

Did your most recent posts for this blog not post or something? I am just sure I've droppped by more recently than 2/19, and I knew nothing, Sis. Sorry for my apparent indifference.

Anyway, I'm testing OpenOffice on this machine; it's a little klunky, I'm finding, but certainly the price is right.

In general, what do you do for backup?