a restored disaster

I've been taking my computer for granted lately.  Doing things like leaving it run for weeks at a time without a reboot, keeping 20-plus windows open at all times, never cleaning the internet junk, ignoring repairs on my registry, and perpetually waiting to back up my files when I get around to it.

That last one was problematic when my comp decided to turn itself off and refused to reboot.  No problem.  I'll just start in safe mode and take it back in time.  No dice on that.  This thing just kept trying to fire up, then quit, then fire up, and quit for a couple hours before I began to realize I might have a problem here.  I checked out all hardware and everything was working great so I had no choice but to restore the damn thing and bring it back to out-of-the-box standards.  I managed to save most of my programs but the thousands of pictures, videos, and movies were gone and replaced with a few of those idiotic sample pics they like to give you so you have an idea what a picture looks like.  Just like a basic full format, my data was irretrievably lost in the mists of time.

As I searched the internet for a way to get my stuff back, I found a program called File Restorer and spend a few minutes downloading it and somewhere between 4 hours and eternity trying to make the damn thing work.  I mean, it takes a long time to go through your whole hard drive looking for deleted files that you hope to bring back to life.  Every time I got close to identifying all that lost data the wind would blow and flick my electricity off and on, and all that effort and waiting was lost.  I must have ran this stupid program four times since last night, and finally when it actually locates all that data and promises me those thousands of pictures will be restored, it loses them again.  All my files got deleted, found, deleted, found, deleted, found, and deleted before I gave up on this program doing anything other than pissing me off!  That's when I remembered I had an external hard drive that's been silently backing up my files for several years.  I never paid much attention to it, since you can't really play with it.  It's not like it has any special features. It just sits there, blending into the woodwork, backing up my files without so much as a pop-up to remind me.

After a little digging I managed to locate all of my deleted pics and a ton of full length movies long gone from my temp files but snagged by this HD.

BTW, the computer now runs like a raped ape.

I guess my point in all this is if you wait til disaster strikes before you do something, you're going to take some nasty hits.  Like so many things in life, just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there for you.  Get your insurance squared away, stock up on food and ammo, and get an external hard drive.

You'll thank me later if ya do.