Get this… I started working on an article the other day, I took a quick break by stepping away from the computer, when I came back, it had died. I’ve had that machine for 8 years!
After a few hours of troubleshooting with slow internet, we think we have a bad hard drive. It’s going to take some time to get it back up. We’re going to perform surgery after we obtain the parts.
All my notes are on that machine, but I’ll try and keep the articles coming until I can fix it and restore my data and/or get a new one.
Ohh, being the nice guy that I am, I pulled the dictator card in my household and commandeered the daughters laptop. Actually, she didn’t mind.
My computer situation has been a disaster to say the least. I had backups, but unfortunately those backups are broken — wait until you hear the story. So the kids and I have been living on the computer trying to restore our files. We’ve made some progress, but have other avenues to exhaust. I’ll hope to be posting again next week, but this is just consuming all of my time right now.
In a couple weeks I’ll be in a location where I can have a tech with “special tools” see if he can resurrect my machine. I’m hoping. The kids and I managed to recover some of the files from my defunct backup. Thankfully, or I’d have nothing. All the pictures, thankfully we have some.
So if you get anything out of this, ensure you have backups (of backups) of your computer if it’s important to you. More importantly, ensure your backups work! It seems like that’s the point of a backup, but in my case (and many others as I’ve come to learn), it didn’t.
Well, we finally got to a decent sized town and had a computer guy look at my machine. It’s official, the hard drive failed, and he couldn’t do anything more than we did for my broken backup.
So, I’ll be sending the hard drive off to a lab to see if they can recover my files.
My backup file didn’t even work. Note to everyone on Mac… If you’re using Time Machine for backups, it’s best to plug directly into your router. Otherwise, via WIFI, if the connection is interrupted, your backup may not work if you need it. The internet is filled with horror stories.
So not to bore you with the details, but I’d hate for anyone else to go through this mess.
The good news is, we do have my machine up and running again, but no files, except what we can scab from my broken backups, which will deal with depending on what the lab finds. Regardless, we have lots of stuff thankfully, and hopefully the lab can help us out as well.
Actually, she didn’t mind. 
