Friday, October 22, 2010

I Thought I Was Being Punked

Photograph by mcfarlandmo

 So yesterday was both great and not great. I got a request for some chapters -- great! 

My computer fritzed out and typed like one...letter...at...a...time.

NOT Great. It took me four hours to complete my edits on four chapters and send them to the person who needed them.

Yikes!

Needless to say I was an absolute basket case when my hubby returned home. He'd been trying to get me to do a total system recovery on my five-year-old laptop. Yes, they made laptops back then. 

I'd been resisting because I also keep all of our pictures and homeschool records on my laptop. The family computer is for games and downloading junk that will freeze it and we just do restore points and move on with life. 

But my computer has all the books I've written, the proposals, the research...everything.

Now, I've had Mozy for months now. For those who don't know, its an offsite data storage company. So my computer is backed up regularly.  Also I've saved stuff on a pen drive and emailed copies of stuff to myself. 

But unless you've met me and see first hand what a distrustful and cynical, "my glass is probably poisoned" type of techno-phobe I am...then you won't understand how after all of those precautions, I was still wracked with nerves as my husband wiped the computer back to factory settings.

Thirteen gigs gone...in minutes.  Ahhh!

So now I'm downloading everything from Mozy. Its called a Web Recovery and I only freaked out on the Help-Line Chat Dude once! Progress, people...this is what it looks like. 

I have twenty-eight dowload files to load and they each take twenty minutes to dowload. I'm gonna be busy for a few days. Also, they're zipped so I have to extract them all. I don't know what made it and what is floating in cyber la-la land forever out of my reach.  I'll keep you posted.

Anyway, I'm working off of the family computer for now. I'm going to use this writing down time to research oil derricks, tensile strength, and sand boiling under levees. If you don't hear from me soon the FBI probably took me in the middle of the night. 

Until next time...Go Write!