Disaster struck last wednesday, as the hard drive on my laptop failed – now i DO back up occasionally when i remember, but clearly as the last 5 days has shown, i simply don’t do it often enough, and because i’ve always just occasionally backed up work to a flash disk, it’s rammed this home as i realised the photos and music i’d collected over the past 3 years had all disappeared as i’d never bothered with those folders!
thankfully a lot of my work stuff is online – already uploaded, so i guess i only lost about 10 days of work, and a few image files that i’d received by email before christmas and hadn’t got round to using, but it’s still a lot to redo, plus the loss of all my emails, and the fact i’ve now had to shell out for a new laptop and install all the relevant software again!
I’m going to try and take positives from the situation – it’s not fatal, i’ve learnt a lesson “reasonably” cheaply, and i am now the proud owner of a lovely new laptop with Linux Ubuntu installed as i’ve finally had the guts to leap away from windows of whatever flavour – i got fed up of XP updates, etc. I’m also now the proud owner of a portable external hard drive (500GB) which i intend to use at least once a week to make sure if this happens again i’m not quite as distraught as this time!
I’ll probably write a grumble at some point about Ubuntu, but so far, from getting all my email accounts set up, and downloading and installing all the essential software (openoffice instead of microsoft office, filezilla, skype, a couple of editors for php, html and css) it’s all gone very smoothly, and everything has been easy and worked first time! I’m delighted i didn’t opt for windows 7, as i’m sure i’d still be wading through whatever idiots guide they have to the new features, and clicking popups to say YES, I REALLY REALLLLLY want to open a new browser window. The genius of Ubuntu so far seems to be that it doesn’t let me mess with the basic operating system, but i can do just about anything else i want without being warned by “helpful” advice prompts every 10 seconds.
Well, back to work now, and back to trying to remember and replicate what it was i’d done over the last 2 weeks!