You have a companion; a confidant; a friend... possibly a best friend. You share everything with this friend. Your thoughts. Your memories. Your hopes. Your dreams. You work together. You play together. You even go on vacations together.
OK - now imagine that this friend that knows you so well - the keeper of all your memories - meets with a tragedy that wipes out there memory completely. Imagine the devastation of staring at someone who stares back blankly as if they have never met you before. It's a fate almost worse than if there had been a tragic death.
That's me. Today. Right now.
My computer doesn't recognize me.
I had problems with the hinge on my laptop which was causing the case to separate along the lefthand side. So I was thrilled to discover the repair would be completely covered by my warranty. Huzzah.
One minor drawback ... the computer gets mailed to a service center far, far away and might be gone for up to two weeks. *sigh* But one does what one must - I got the shipping box and off went my computer to faraway Fremont, California. (Oddly enough, I lived for about 20 years right there in Fremont.)
Anyway, imagine my surprise when I got notice about 5 days after shipping my computer that it was coming back to me already - all fixed up good as new. Huzzah.
I wasn't home when the Fedex truck came by, so I had to go to the local depot and pick up my package, my baby, my friend. But when I get it home and boot it up, I find a stranger staring back at me. For some incomprehensible reason, HP service saw fit to 're-image' my hard drive.
When I said 'good as new' I wasn't kidding.
All my pictures.
All my documents.
Everything gone.
I'm so sad. I want to scream or cry or maybe throw things. I briefly thought I might jump off a bridge. Well... maybe a very short bridge.
So now I'm running a program that might let me recover some or all of my lost files. Perhaps someday soon my old friend will be back.
I'm sure things will never be quite the same. And I suspect that some of those intangibles are gone forever - like the absolute trust a girl has in her computer. And the hair I pulled out when I realized what had happened.
But with any luck things will be back to something resembling normality in a fairly short while.
The moral of the story:
Back up your computer, dummy!!!!!
4 comments:
Hopefully you can recover some of those files! I back up everything periodically on an external Seagate hard drive just in case my PC fails.
I'm surprised they formatted without letting you know.
Good luck....
John
Oooohhhhh Nooooo...that is every persons nightmare!!
Does it run any faster now?? Small consilation, I know.
Odd that they just reformatted without letting you know.
.....make it a great day....kath
Hi John -
I really have to chalk much of my aggravation up to my own stupidity on this one. HP warns you before you send in your computer that the possibility exists that they will reformat your drive if they run into any problems. I thought I was OK since it was just a case issue, but I really can't say I wasn't warned.
I've been able to salvage about 6 DVDs of images documents, and other files from the drive. Only problem now is that I have literally thousands of files with names like "recovered_jpeg_89.jpg" that I'll have to hunt through one file at a time to see what I actually have. Ugh!
Hey Kath -
Thanks for the moral support. No kidding about it being a nightmare. I hope I've finally learned my lesson about backing things up - I feel almost like I've lost the entire last year of my life.
*sigh*
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