Friday, March 23, 2012

Singing the Hard Drive Blues

Last Thursday, the hard drive on my laptop went kablooie.  I won't say I'm the kind of person who doesn't back things up regularly, but . . . I'm the kind of person who doesn't back things up as often as I should.  I was out for coffee with a new friend on Thursday, and it worked fine.  But I got home and, nothing.  I waited 40 minutes for Firefox to load up -- and it never did.  The guy who fixes my computer picked it up on Friday and kept it until Tuesday -- I felt as if I had lost a limb.  Before he came, I was frantically trying to back things up, and I got most of my work files and pictures off, but I had to leave my extensive collection of textures behind.  

 I've been feeling kind of poisoned this week.

When I got it back, then the fun began.  Have you ever had to rebuild a hard drive from scratch?  I've been doing it nonstop for the last four days.  So many programs -- Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. -- I don't have on disc, so I had to re-download them.   And you have to get Flash, Adobe Reader, Quicktime, on and on.  And then, I had to go through my paypal records, seeing whom I made payments to over the last two years -- and contact all those people, to ask if they could replace the textures I'd gotten from them.  

They were all wonderful.  Jill at Flypaper (I'm their biggest fan) sent them right away, as did others.  But one artist went way beyond helping me recover my textures -- she sent me her entire collection, way beyond what I had initially purchased from her.  I was very touched.

  But, there's always some light in the darkness -- 

Oh, and my Wacom tablet went on the fritz today -- so it will be hard for me to finish my final for the Painting with Computers class -- sigh.  I'll have to do it very carefully, in Photoshop (so hard to do with a mouse).  

How is everyone else doing?  Tell me something nice.

5 comments:

Chris Flynn said...

Oh wow... what a nightmare! I'm so glad you were able to retrieve some -most?- of your textures! Your work is amazing... I'm looking forward to following your progress! Plus, I've enjoyed looking at all your past works. Now... I'm going to visualize that Wacom tablet de-fritzing!

I sent a link to your blog and flypaper to my photographer friend Frank. Had fun looking around this morning.

Have a great weekend!

Anne said...

I know how that feels. The hard drive of my computer also crashed on me a couple of years ago and took away all my files with it. It was like seeing my life's work all go down the drain. Hope you've got things working again.

Elise Ann Wormuth said...

Thanks -- I'm pretty much up and running, though I'm still missing a few things. People were very quick and kind in letting me re-download stuff. Now if only I could find my Painter DVD --

Ruby said...

I'm sorry for what happened to your hard drive, Elise. Now that you've learned your lesson, be vigilant. There are other options aside from backing up your hard drive. You can go with online backup. Have you tried that one before? It's pretty easy and very helpful. What you do is you store your files in the internet so you can access them wherever, whenever.

Ruby Badcoe

Lisa Gordon said...

Oh Elise, I am sorry!
I sure hope all is well again soon.
It is amazing just how much we come to depend on these things.