The Death of a Hard Drive

If you've wondering where I am (yes, I know, you've nothing better to do than sit around drumming your fingers impatiently waiting for me to post something), the biggest part of the blame goes to a tragedy of immense proportions. My hard drive died. Caput. Nothing. Nada. It was just gone.

It happened just days before Christmas--while working on the most glorious Christmas letter ever known to man. I can say that because no one will ever see it. It's just gone. Caput. Nothing...you get the idea.

My husband rushed the sickly device off to the land of computer gurus (his workplace), but a whole team of digital icons couldn't resuscitate it. The next step was to try to restore the data that was one it.

Let me just take a commercial break here to give a big shout out to Carbonite. Not that they did me any good - but in theory they could have. Ironically, my husband was getting a subscription to the backup service for Christmas, but that was too little too late. It had been about three months since backing up my current manuscript. And there were two years worth of pictures. Not to mention all the emails. His attempts at restoration dragged out while he tried software program after software program...all the while I kept remembering items that were lost and grieving and moaning and weeping and wailing. It wasn't pretty.

Finally he was able to come home with about a bazillion files - all labeled only by numbers. I was so excited...until I had to start the job of figuring out what was what.

Did you know that every time you save a document, a record of it is stored on your computer? Do you how many times you save an 80,000 word document while writing and polishing it? I don't. But I do know that there was a file - a file I could only identify by opening - for every blasted time I saved either of the 80K word documents I've been working on for the past two years!

I kept asking the computer-genius hubby how I was going to get all these extra files OFF the computer. And he kept assuring me they weren't really there. I'd point out, ever so patiently, that I was looking right at them. And he'd point out...not quite as patiently...that I just had to trust him. They weren't really there.

So yeah...I totally get that. It's my new mantra. Just because I can see it doesn't mean it's there. (Like faith in reverse.)

But the good news is that, after hours and hours of scouring stupid numbered files that were all ALMOST the same thing, I have found everything important. Everything I can remember anyway. And I'm sure my sanity will be restored any day now. Does anybody know if there's software for that? I'd ask the hubby, but he's been a little testy lately.