The unthinkable has happened...

When one is as digitally dependent as I am for my businesses and my communications it is almost unthinkable that my main portal to that digital world could crash; but that's what has happened. Yesterday the disk drive in my laptop bought the farm. I had a hard windows stop and then nothing. The thing just wouldn't boot again. I suspected the disk drive right away, but hoped against hope that it might be something else or (foolishly) that somehow the disk drive (or the data thereon) might be able to be rescued. It was not to be.

The repair shop tried everything they know, but the disk is toast. They did say that they know a company that can take the disk apart and try to reconnect pieces to other components in order to get the data off - but for a hefty price. I won't go that for to save myself the work necessary to rebuild my digital world.

Fortunately I do have backup software; but, like most I don't use it in as disciplined a fashion as I should. As luck would have it, I did do what I hope was a good image backup just 10 days before the crash. I use Macrium backup software, which is supposed to pull a full image backup of my C drive. That would save my bacon, if I can now get it to restore. I've been a naively trusting soul up to this point, so we shall see.

Like the panicky miscreant swearing to God that he'll lead a Godly life if he is just rescued from whatever mess he is in; I've been swearing to myself that I will be more diligent about making at least weekly backups, if only this backup image works when I try to restore it. The other thing that something like this gives one pause to ponder is how much of the stuff that is in that backup I really need? As I took stock of the things that would be a major pain to have to manually recreate, I realized that there is much more stuff that I have been backing up that I really don't need and should probably discard.

I'll keep you posted on how the restore process goes. The shop that is repairing the laptop is putting is a bigger disk (they no longer make the smaller type that was in mine before the crash) and reloading the OS and basic apps. That means I still have a bunch of apps to reload, which for many will mean having to find the registration codes for them and then updating them again from the base level that is on the disk or in the original downloaded install files. That will be the major time consumer. It's going to be a looooong week.