Well, I gave in and wiped the harddrive on the laptop after trying just about every method known to man to try to get any files off it. The file system was completely hosed.
Reinstalling the OS and upgrading to Leopard and then reinstalling Office and Adobe’s Creative Suite took way too long. I’m still missing some stuff, but luckily I had registration codes written down for everything except one and I think I lost the email for that one in the wipe.
Fortunately, I only lost about 5 days worth of edits and journal entries that weren’t backed up on my desktop machine. I’m giving what used to be called .mac or iDisk and is now known as MobileMe a trial. For $99 a year, they’ll back up all the preferences and data from my Apple-centric software. Sadly, I don’t like Mail, Safari, iCal, or Address Book and prefer Entourage. So, if I want that stuff backed up, I have to do a bunch of picky hand-setting of what I want archived. Add to this, if I don’t want to give up my two free month trial, I can pay my money now and upload more than 100mb at a time.
Do you know how small 100mb is?! Sheesh.
So on the whole, I’m not TOO depressed about having to wipe it, but I am feeling a distinct sting where all my contacts, emails and stuff that wasn’t backed up have been ripped from me. Yes, for a digital packrat, this sucks. Oh well, life goes on and more will be accumulated over time.
So the plans this week are to jump back in at the deep end and keep going. At least the writing stuff lost wasn’t new pages, just some edits. It could have been so much worse than having to resummarize the scenes in Revealed, but I’m looking at them closely in terms of subplots and what I can do to expand on Barrington’s story line. I also printed out the whole beast so I can work on the edits from that and know which pages have been revised for sure. Yup, list of pages revised went poof too.
So that’s how my week wrapped up. Dr. Horrible was definitely a bright spot. Joss Whedon is pure EVIL!
I hope you haven’t paid that $100 yet, Kaige. Please read this: http://www.blogography.com/archives/2008/07/bullet_sunday_8_9.html
Written by a man who positive ADORES anything Apple. He says MobileMe is an Epic Fail. If Dave says it, you can believe it. I use Mozy online for backups both on my personal computer and my outside tech uses it for some things at my office. He wouldn’t be a Mozy reseller/partner if it didn’t work. Glad you’re back up and running!
Dr. Horrible did *not* disappoint.
I’m sorry to hear about your laptop debacle. It’s odd, but I know of many, many stories of writers losing files while working on books. At all other times, the computers behave, but when something is being written, watch out! It sounds like you didn’t lose too much, which is good.
I deleted my entire book once. I have no idea how it happened. But J was able to recover it for me. *whew*
Even my mom liked Dr. Horrible. 🙂
At least I’d been backing up stuff fairly regularly, I guess I’m going to become a bit more religious about it. Yay for J!
And thanks, Winter, I’ll check into Mozy too. I haven’t had any access issues with MobileMe, but was annoyed by the lack of third party synching. I get it, but it’s still annoying.
Aw, Kaige. I’m so sorry.
I don’t recognize any of the software you’re mentioning, but I’m a PC girl, lol.
Here’s to a better week and new edits that ROCK.
It happens. Hey, I didn’t think about your email being on here. Doh. I don’t have Kristal’s either. Can you mail us both with an update, Andi? *hint, hint*