Back It Up

Atticus: Mommy, why are you crying?

Me: Well, Mommy is just not very smart right now.

Atticus: That's okay, Mommy, you're still pretty.


Why was I crying? Why am I not smart? Why is there no cute photo of my son on this post? Let me tell you.

We have three pcs. Two desktops (the Dell and the HP) and an old laptop. The Dell was our old main pc which we stripped and gave to the boys for The Dora Game, The Tractor Game and all kinds of important stuff. It crashed a few months ago, and we didn't try to hard to fix it. The HP, which is only nine months old, became our main pc. We migrated all the data from the Dell to the HP: pictures, movies, finances etc. Well, two days ago, the HP crashed. The boy at Firedog said "Bad hard drive, but don't worry, you're under warranty." I smiled and thanked him, and calmly and politely asked if they could recover our data. "Maybe," he said, "we'll let you know at the end of the day." I smiled politely again. Inside I was screaming "Are you fucking kidding me? The end of the day?!?! Do you people realize I have every picture of my children since they were born on that pc?" No, I never got around to backing it up.

Now, I blame perfectionism and attention deficit disorder. I have sat down many times to back up My Documents. Every time I'd get engrossed in the photos, thinking how cool it would be to burn a slide show to VCD. I even went as far as two weeks ago purchasing a program so I could burn to DVD. We could all happily sit around the TV, reminiscing and watching slideshows of the childhoods of our boys.

Well, that evening the nice boy at Firedog called and apologized they could not even get a pc to recognize the hard drive, and the data was "too deep." He asked if I wanted to go ahead and exchange the bad drive out for a new one. "No," I said, "I'll come pick it up." I was working under the same premise as those who froze Walt Disney. Someday we'll have the technology.

Immediately I called my brother, who is a Computer Genius. He recovered the data from my laptop when that hard drive went bad. Okay, now you're thinking "She really is stupid, this happened to her before and she still didn't back up her drive." Well, please refer to my previous statement in blaming perfectionism and ADD. Anyway, I called my brother, the Computer Genius. His poor girlfriend probably thought someone died when I called, sobbing. Referring to the guys at Firedog my brother said "Those guys are idiots, bring it to me, we'll see what we can do." In defense of the idiots at Firedog, the nice boy was clear to me that all was not lost, but that that they only did a primary software data recovery. There were people who would take the thing apart and extract the data to the tune of $1600.

Well, that was last night. No luck yet, according to my brother, but he'll work on it more tonight. In the meantime I need to decide whether $1600 is worth it to get those pictures back. What would you do?

And oh, by the way, this is a cautionary tale. Go back up your hard drive. Do it now. I'm going to back up this crappy old laptop... as soon as I cook dinner.