~a smattering of sarah~

hardware

Back-up Disaster

Posted on Fri, 2006-07-14 15:15 by sarahfelicity
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My worst fears confirmed: I know enough about my computer to be dangerous, and not enough to protect myself from fuck-ups.

When my dear brother bought me this laptop for Christmas, he bought it with the standard 40GB hard drive, which has proven patently inadequate for me and my purposes. So I have an external drive, to which I periodically back up my user folder. I was always kind of leery of trusting that process, though, so I didn't delete much from my main hard drive.... until it just got WAY too full to avoid it anymore.

So last week I carefully backed up my user folder, making sure that all the photos I've taken recently, and all my beloved photos from the past, were saved. And I started deleting things from my laptop hard drive. I deleted all photos from prior to 2006, and managed to buy myself a bit of space. But then today my hard drive was once again so full that it actually couldn't even open new programs, so I decided to do another backup (better safe than sorry) and start being even more vicious with my deleting of stuff.

But something went wrong, and after my backup this morning, what I am left with is a carbon copy of my CURRENT user folder... and nothing else. In other words, everything that I have deleted in the past week (LOTS of old photos, mostly) is gone. Just gone.

OMG WTF. BBQ, even. I'm distressed! I mean, I won't die – I do have enough perspective to know that it's not the END of the world – but it sure sucks. I only really started using Flickr last September, so anything that pre-dates that, or that I didn't post to Flickr (save a few things I do have saved on CD) is gone. Which sucks.

Makes me wonder yet again about the long-term problems of data storage. If I'm overwhelmed by it now, only a couple of years into owning a digital camera, then I'm not quite sure where I'll be in 20 years? Drowning in data, if I don't figure this stuff out. And in the meantime, I'm reliant on my increasingly poor memory to remind me of my colourful past.

Lessons in non-attachment. Dammit.

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About this Site

A hodge-podge of random thoughts, musings, and links – sometimes about social change, sometimes about technology and the web, sometimes about yoga, and occasionally about knitting. Sometimes (because I'm a Canadian girl with deep roots in the British Isles) I even write about the weather.

I'm a yoga teacher, founder of Yoga for Geeks, and a freelance web writer, strategist, and project manager. I also help to co-create the amazing Web of Change Conference, every September in beautiful British Columbia.

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