21 September 2010

Back into the office today and I'm not feeling the sharpest (a little tired...). It's time to deal with the computer and try to make it work properly again. It's not a big problem, as the IT boffins back in Perth were clever enough to recognize the possibility of needing to do this, so they'd set it up with the ability to be restored. My part of the deal was to do regular backups while I am here in Chile, so that in the event something goes pear-shaped, I'll be able to restore everything and the world will be right again. Of course, there's always tomorrow to do that sort of thing, so you guessed it, I hadn't done a backup.

When I arrived at the office, I had two things to do. Finish copying off my travel photo's and copy off my email archives. Then, I'd be ready to restore. BUT, as I mentioned, I wasn't exactly feeling the sharpest, so I launched in to the restoring program. 10 seconds into the process, and I have a sickening realization. Emails and photo's are still on the computer and are about to be wiped out. I frantically press buttons to try and stop what is happening, and fortunately, the computer stops erasing. Unfortunately, it has erased enough such that it now works less well than before. Oh dear.

I'm rather ashamed to admit that I've been in a similar circumstance to this before, so I knew what to do. Pull the computer apart and remove the disk drive. Off to the local computer shop, buy a case to put the disk drive in such that I can connect it to another computer. Download every single file with a .jpg and .pst extension (those for pictures and email archives). Spend the next week at home of an evening sorting through the dross that computers generate while looking for my pictures and emails.

In the end, the computer is rebuilt and I'm back to where I was at the end of May. Nearly four months worth of emails gone, but at least I've got a working computer again. I spend the next few days reloading all of the additional software that is needed, and then what do I do? Yep, make a back-up. It seems there is no time like the present for that sort of thing!

Lesson learnt!

Regards,

Andrew