a cautionary tale

My friends. Back your hard drives up. Seriously! Tuesday I was in the library, doing the normal studying and such. I was on Lexis, looking up a document for class, when suddenly I was getting no response from my computer. Nothing. Nada. Zip. The mouse arrow just disappeared. Usually when a Mac pauses for a few moments to "think", a colorful pinwheel spins along, letting you know the computer is pausing but that all is well. The pinwheel didn't come up. So, I shut the computer off. And then I restarted it. And nothing came up but a white screen. I turned it off and tried it a little later. This time I left it on, just to see what would happen. Nothing.

So here is my advice. Back it up. I just assumed because I have a Mac that I would be fine. And I do have Apple Care, so I didn't have to pay for the new hard drive. However, they couldn't recover my data. I had all my photos, including my most recent frolic in Europe, saved on my computer and nowhere else. Now I can contact some of my fellow travelers and get their pictures. However, I spent two days in Heidelberg by myself. I took about 150 to 200 photos. They are gone. I was, gulp, working on a book. I had about 100 pages written (it was rough, I'll admit, but still, it was 100 pages). Gone. I do have the old hard drive in my possession. And I'm hoping that one day I'll find a generous soul to help me out or that I'll have the cash to retrieve it (Jeremy, the Genius Bar assistant at the Mac store, told me it runs about 800 smack-a-roonies!). Anyway, I would hate for anyone to have this happen to them. 

Oh, and if you have any pictures that you think I might be interested in having in my possession, please let me know and send them on. Or, if you have them on facebook or something, let me know. I'm going to be signing up for that so that I can get some photos from my class mates.