My computer

[jain]

So, my computer failure turned out not to be the motherboard--which is what the computer geeks in my life had been speculating based on my description of the failure--but instead my hard drive. This had the potential to be very, very bad, since I am lazy about backing up my files, but! My brother was able to recover all of my data!!! It took some doing, including sticking my dying hard drive in the freezer for a bit and retrieving the data with a computer running Linux when it became evident that the computer running Windows just could. not. do it., but in the end he prevailed.

This also means that I didn't have to replace my entire computer, but just the hard drive, which is much easier on my pocketbook (even if I am the tiniest bit sad that I can't justify buying a laptop anymore). The replacement of my hard drive went something like this:

Me: So, how much will a new hard drive cost me? And how quickly can it get here, like, two days? I don't want to wait too much longer to have a functioning computer.
Brother: (turns to rummage in one of his drawers for a bit) Well, I can give you this two terabyte one for $100.

So I now have a gorgeous, huge new hard drive, and my computer is running smoothly again, and I'm trying out Linux and really enjoying it, and basically my brother's the best thing ever. \o/

And now I'm going to go back up my data. :-)

Comments

[frausorge]

So much yay! It's wonderful that you got your data back, and kudos to your brother for such useful help.

[jain]

Thanks! He's a really sweet and helpful guy; I'm lucky to have him around.

\o/

[angel_negra]

Yay for your brother and congrats on the shiny new harddrive. <3

Re: \o/

[jain]

Thanks very much! It is so shiny. :-)

[poisontaster]

I, too, am HORRIBLE about remembering to back up my data and I've had several hard drive crashes where I've lost data that was precious in some way or another. A friend suggested Carbonite to me, which is an online back up service that runs in the background of the computer and backs up files as soon as you modify them. I don't know your financial situation, but I found it to be pretty cheap at the price and the peace of mind has been immeasurable.

[jain]

Thanks for the recommendation! My brother set me up with a Dropbox account at the same time as he was working on my computer, which is great for backing up my text and html files, but which doesn't have enough space to store my video files (unless I pay for an upgraded account) and which also requires me to remember to back up my data. So, yeah, Carbonite might be the way to go for me. :-)

[poisontaster]

Yeah, anything that requires me to remember to back up is just...kind of doomed to failure. I really like Carbonite; it shows you at any given time which files are backed up (green dot) or are pending (orange dot) and I haven't noticed any computer lag for having it in the background all the time. Like you, I have a lot of BIG files (music, video & pictures), so Carbonite really made sense for me.