And, Poof There Went The Backups, Four Years of Backups, Do Believe We Have a Total FAIL Houston

Copyright 2012, CABS for Reflections From the Fence

I have been pushing hard the last month, I finished the "Rome wasn't built in a day, but, may be the ruin of me yet" book.  I have done a bit of cemetery stomping.  I have been fighting Yahoo and making changes in my dependence on them after the hacking I experienced.  We are less than 8 weeks from departure date for THE Trip, THE Encore, there are doctor and dentist appointments, things to clean, things to fix, things to do.  We have been packing in some grandtwins and family time.  The days are getting shorter (as in it gets dark earlier, hard on a gal who suffers SADS).  We have a RV Rally next week in Goshen Indiana, I am teaching 2 classes, and you got it, they have not been written.  We fear we are facing the last days for our beloved Mr. G.  He has gone blind and deaf since our return to Michigan in late April, making life harder for him.  He has days of confusion and days of "nothing wrong with me mom, I am puppylike".  Yep, lots of stress.  But, Carol t'ain't bored!  WOOT!

My next book project was delivered to me in Excel format.  Not my fav piece of software, when I opened the file, there are about 197 pages and over 3600 rows of information, and it needs a bit of editing, and worse yet, all dates of day-month-year type where the year is before 1900, opened as #####.  Oh, voy!  After long and very information discussions with the couple that produced the Excel data base and my son and his very smart wife, I made the decision to install LibreOffice.

Here is where the trouble began.  Man and I have been known to have a difference of opinion when it comes to some things computer.  (See my eyes roll heavenward?)  We surely have boundary issues, so we each have our own computers.  He knows things and does things with computers that are foreign to me, and I use software that he can barely open.   He loves image backups of the computers, I could care less about image backups.  I don't care for them for one reason, that being that any issues I have with the computer, a corrupt file, etc., will just be carried forward if we find it necessary to install that image backup.  He likes them because if we find it necessary to install that backup it can be accomplished in a matter of hours instead of the days it takes to start from scratch re-installing all my software.

FYI, I do keep just about all my files/data on my computer, there may be a few files that were not transferred to this computer since I have had it, I have no idea which ones, I have an old leaky memory.  I do NOT use cloud storage for many reasons, primarily, because it would take me about a year to get just my photos online and stay within the restrictions of my 20 gig a month limit for my internet connection, with NO surfing for either Man and I for that full year, just uploading data.

I have, now had, 1.)  a terabyte external hard drive, and 2.)  a 500 Gig external hard drive.  I have had the terabyte for a few years, it was a MyBook hard drive.  The 500 gig, I have had for less than 2 years and it is a Seagate model.

The 500 gig external hard drive has became my every day unit.  I keep it attached to the computer and I over write any file I use during the day.  The last thing I do at night is to over write all files that change during the day.  The MyBook terabyte is where I save and never replace the files.  About every month, or maybe even every 2 months (OK, maybe every 3 or 4 months since the 500 Gig came into my life, every day backups changed me.) I would backup every single data file I had,  EVERY ONE!  Then, I never overwrote that file.  Next time I hooked up the MyBook I would back up every single data file, but in a new directory with the current date.

The beauty of this set up is that I was able to maintain old files from 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 on the MyBook.  If I needed to look at a photo or any file for that matter, from 2009, I could do that.  This is particularly useful with word processing files.  And, yes, I have gone digging for old word processing files more than once.

SO, Man did not feel comfortable installing LibreOffice without a brand spanking new image file.  I was never comfy with those image files being on the same hard drive as my data files.  I have worn out his ears explaining, I don't care one bit about anything but my data files, IF I have those, I can recover from almost anything.

Yep, I love my data files.  And, yep, you know just where this is going.

He decided to do an image file backup on the MyBook external hard drive.  And, it bricked my external hard drive.  ALL, and I do mean ALL my old data files are GONE.  Poof, never to be retrieved again.  We took the drive to that blue box store that has a geek squad.  They could not do a thing for us.  My data is now extinct.

I knew it was a lost cause when the computer would not recognize the MyBook, and said, the drive needed to be formatted.  I realized that at 3 AM.  Needless to say, I did not sleep real well the rest of the night, by morning, I was just a bit snarly, OK, I was in a royal snit!  I snarled and growled at Man, moaning, groaning, whining, and more.  Goodness it was a tense cup of coffee.

So, now, what??  Well, I have two, yes TWO, new 1.5 terabyte external hard drives, I will come up with some saving scheme/schedule.  I will resume my backups of all data files.  If Man wants to do a image file backup, well, he probably is going to have to find some other hard drive to do so on.  He is not coming near my THREE external hard drives ever again!  My boundary issues just went over the moon.

It has been a long stressful day.  I am not proof reading this post.  I am just posting it.  I have two new external hard drives.  I am over the shock, and am pretty sure that I did not loose more than 2 to 4 % of any of my data.  What I did loose that distresses me is the access to the files from years past, I only have the current versions, which may or may not have changed.

And, LibreOffice is still waiting to be installed. 





* Graphic courtesy of freeclipartnow.com.

.