Upon embarking on a little evening blog-surfing over the weekend, I encountered a strange white screen. After a few minutes a folder came up with a question mark inside, and then it started flashing. I was able to use another computer (not mine) to google "white screen on a mac", and stuff started coming up like "White Screen of Death, Macbook." Uh, that is DEFINITELY NOT a good sign. I wanted to scream and jump up and down like this fellow.
photo from Anne Anderson's Old, Old Fairytales
Rumplestiltskin is his name (I loved that story). Anyhow, after further reading I found out that the hard drive has most likely died. Now what makes this story even more "exciting" is that I had over 1,400 photos in iPhoto. Just in case you didn't get it the first time, that's one thousand and four hundred. Arrrrrrhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!! My PC crashed 2 years ago right after my father passed away and by the grace of God, Best Buy was able to salvage some, but not all, of my photos. It took a long time to get the stuff, and by the time they recovered it, I was just happy to have some photos instead of none. So I bought an external drive and ended up rarely using it--because Mac's don't ever have problems, right? Luckily I got bored a few months ago and attempted to back up my hard drive. I never checked to see if it everything transferred, but I definitely have the most important photos, which are those of my father and our last Christmas together in 2006.
So what this means is that not only am I majorly crippled without a computer, I've also lost practically everything!!! I have no photos of the way my house looked before I moved in (I do have ones of my bathrooms, though. Thank God I at least posted my kitchen already!), and none of all of the work in progress. Vacation photos? Gone. 10 year high school reunion photos? Gone. College Graduation? Gone. I lost all of my latest random projects (photo frames, furniture, etc.), and the blogging stuff I hadn't posted about yet! I even lost all of my bookmarks I had saved (easily over 200)--my favorite sites, places I wanted to visit, and interesting tidbits of information!!!!! I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing, but this is all I can think of right now. Awwwwwww!!!!!!! I wish I would've just loaded all of the photos into Blogger and used them as needed, but of course I didn't have that forethought. So I'll be working hard on my posts, and trying to search through my external drive to find some of my other stuff. Please take this a reminder to BACK YOUR FILES UP!!!!! Through Googling, I found out that Mac has something called a "time machine" where you can back your computer up, and if it ever goes out, after you do a system restore you can load the "time machine" and put your computer back just like it was the last time you were on it--home page and everything. A lotta good it does me now, but I won't be selfish and hog the info. For all of you bloggers & blog-readers, there's still time. If you don't have an external drive, you can also do an online backup with a company like Mozy for as little as $4.95/month. If you're like me and your photos are the most important things to you, please do this now. You never think it'll happen to you until it does. Cry, cry, tear, tear. I told Beth that I wanted to pull all of my hair out, but I thought twice because then I'd be depressed because I'd be ugly, and being depressed around the holidays is a recipe for disaster (worse than not backing up). So while I do have my hair (which looked quite good in some of those photos), I've lost mementos of many important events in my life over the last several years. :( So I ask again . . . how sad are you for me???
