A computer death has occurred.
My Facebook post summed it up best: We hauled the corpse into the store where it was pronounced DOA. Happily we were able to confirm we’re saved. No attempts to resurrect. This apple was rotten to the core.
Because it held 6,000 photos, the potential crash of our Mac was of great concern. We already were on our second hard drive and we’d lost all the 2009 Europe photos (except the ones posted on Facebook) when the first one went down. But after considerable trial and error, we copied them onto an auxiliary hard drive and I could sleep at night.
When the screen began to routinely freeze last week, I asked my husband for a concerted effort to copy all the documents as well–particularly my current novel, 90% written, and all the data for the next novel.
He pulled it off. We were saved!
Raising children and running computers in our household over the last 29 years has meant lots of agony. Somehow, in ways no one could ever explain, every time a new game was loaded on the machines–something no doubt dedicated to keeping America safe from aliens–the need for more memory always seemed to mean MY writing got deleted.
It almost became a routine Victorian household drama: disbelief, crying, gnashing of teeth and Michelle to bed with vapors of indignation.
“But, Mom, we destroyed all the aliens!”
I can laugh about it now.
(As writer Mary Ellis once said, “you can’t exactly dislike a child you’ve borne and bred, but you can have a very good try.”)
My in-house engineer likes to remind me machines are fallible, you have to expect them to fail at some point and be prepared. I routinely e-mail my manuscript in progress to myself–AOL can keep track of it. I’d been worried about losing all the Civil War data I’ve collected for the next project and burned a CD of the material months ago. I mailed it to my researcher friend Kim, just in case.
Our PC is backed up every day to Mozy’s cloud. Computer death with be tragic, but we’ll survive. Click to Tweet
It’s not just machines that can fail us, however, and we need to anticipate other problems.
I live in a high fire zone, one mile west of the San Andreas fault in California. I’ve copied family photos onto CDs and sent them to my brothers. I probably should upload them to Picassa or Picknik so they’re available on the cloud should California disappear.
In the inside cupboard door above the telephone, I’ve posted a list: Things to Take in a Fire, in descending order of importance and with a note of where to find them in the house. I probably should run a fire drill to learn how much I can gather in 10 minutes.
Thankfully, so much information can now be stored on line, I’m not so worried about losing financial data, IRS records or even my passport photo, because it can be retrieved electronically now.
(Note on passport–I scanned the first pages of our passports and e-mailed them to myself. If I ever lose my passport ina foreign country, I just need to access e-mail again to prove who I am. I even have a copy on my I-touch. )
But perhaps the most important hardship is one I can count on: I’ll die someday.
I take my vitamins, I go to the gym. I drink a lot of water and I’ve never touched a cigarette. I’m going to die one day, anyway.
Which brings me back around to resurrection and being saved.
I’m prepared. Are you? 🙂
Any other tips on anticipated difficulties we can prepare for in advance?
Wow. 🙂