And it all came crashing down...

Wow... I can't believe its been two months since my last post. Well... I can and I can't. It seems like it was just last week when I was happily typing away on my Christmas Quilt project and how everything seemed to be moving full steam ahead.

And then it suddenly wasn't.

My computer crashed, and it crashed hard. Yes, I had a computer crash earlier this year, where the beautiful workhorse I had built to my specifications turned up toes and went home to that great motherboard in the sky. There was panic, there was SERIOUS PANIC, panic in the ways of stomach turning and tears that I had lost all of my photography files, cross stitch patterns, etc.  Thankfully, the majority of my files were able to be salvaged and put onto an external hard drive. We had purchased a refurbished computer for Richard not much earlier, but without any fanfare he quietly set up his new-to-him-but-used computer and went back to using his old one.

Well, at least I didn't actually kill the "new" one... I just overwhelmed it to the point where it was running massively slow and then finally froze up. Its simple 1 TB drive (hey, if it isn't a baking measurement then the size means nothing to be, other than its supposed to be a lot) was overwhelmed by all of my photo, music and pattern files and just couldn't hold any more. It drew a line in the sand that I hadn't even noticed and that final month of churning out cross stitch patterns right and left are not only what took me across that line, but absolutely obliterated it.

This time there were no moments of tears and frustration... only that sinking feeling in my stomach as I came to the realization that the earlier temporary bandage had hemorrhaged under the amount of pressure I had placed on it. Instead of a cast to help the system heal I had left the jury-rigged splint on, failed to maintain it and just kept on running in a marathon that I had no business inflicting on it.

So we first purchased a new external hard drive... 5 TB this time, and Richard slowly began transferring files over. Sadly, a lot didn't make it through the transition, but I didn't now that for sure until we managed to get me a new (not sorta new but not really... this one here is The Real McCoy). Even better, this one came with a seriously nice 27" widescreen monitor... something my aging eyes is very grateful for.

So what has been lost?

I seem to still have most of my music files, and the photography is good, though I lost all of the more recent edited shots, so i'll have to edit them again if I want those specific shots back. I have, however, lost all of my recently worked up cross stitch pattern files (over 200, which equates to several hundreds of hours), which breaks my heart, but its nothing I can't rebuild, given time. Its a project I should be well in the middle of replacing, but winter is really playing havoc with my health, so I haven't had much time that I can spend in front of the computer.

Basically I have lost all of the work I have done since my last computer crash earlier this year. My computer had been set up to back up to the external hard drive on a regular basis, but didn't and it failed to notify me that it wasn't performing its routine back up (something I have now learned to verify for myself rather than trusting technology to do it for me).

I now keep the majority of my files on external drives, rather than tax my computer's systems. One drive (my 5 TB workhorse that I have lovingly named "Big Red", because he's red, he's not huge physically, but hey, its the biggest drive i've ever owned, thanks  to Amazon holding an amazing sale), and my 1 TB "Old Blue" (not really old, but he's older than Red and, yes, he is blue) is going to be solely for back ups. I'll purchase a 3rd drive soon that I will transfer all of our music files to (as well as digitize that big box of CDs sitting in my office) so Richard and I can shuttle music between ourselves as needed, as Red is going to be slowly filled up between my photo and pattern files, and the amount of music we have already digitized is pretty substantial.

So yes, this time I am doing it right, and even though it will take time, I will retrace my steps and remake the patterns that were lost. Now that I have a computer to get back online with, the posts will start coming on a regular basis again. I am sorry it has taken this long to start it back up, but now that the injury has been dealt with (instead of field dressings think Steve Austin's Six Million Dollar Man... we had the technology and my computing capabilities certainly got a nice upgrade), I can make up for the lost time and get to it. Best of all, the old computing speed is now a thing of the past, so I should be able to cut those hundreds of hours down to something a little more manageable.

Its great to be back, and I hope that you will hang in there as I get everything back on track and do things right this time.

Thanks for being there everyone, and I hope that all is well in whatever part of the world that you find yourself in.

Oh, and don't forget your back ups!

What was lost has been found....

As many of you probably know, my MacBook died a few months back and I worried about salvaging all of my photographs... I had a ton of photographs.  I was also concerned because I had a lot of photos saved on our old PC that had died over a year ago and I hadn't been able to do anything with that old hard drive.

Thankfully, I found someone to build me a new PC.  He also took the photo and music files from not only the old PC but the MacBook as well and transfer them all to an external hard drive that I had.

At first I was a bit worried, because when I booted up the hard drive I could only see three photo files.  I opened those files and found a whole lot of nothing to be excited about, and my heart fell into my stomach.  

I admit it... I was severely bummed.

But then I told myself they were only photos, and I could always take more.

I started looking around to see what other files I now had access to, and stumbled across a file folder marked "old".  I opened it and discovered three more photo folders.

Okay, I told myself... three more is better than nothing.  So I clicked on one of the folders, and was pleasantly surprised to find it contained a few more photo folders.... which contained a few more photo folders. 

The second photo folder held the bonanza... nearly thirty folders of my old work was tucked away inside!

So now, I am still finding more folders... I haven't had a chance to look at them all, and while a lot of the older work is just okay, some of what I have found are definite keepers.  Right now I would guess I have between 5 to 10 THOUSAND images on my computer that were taken by myself over the last 7 years... and that's after deleting a bunch of shots earlier this week that I no longer wanted to keep.

So yeah, I am going to be kept busy for awhile, going through old files, rearranging things so they will be easier to find, deleting the dross and keeping the gold... and I couldn't be happier about it.

So I give you just a couple of images that I was happy to find again (a couple I had even forgotten I had taken, and those are the really fun ones to stumble across!).  As I said, there are still thousands and thousands to go through, so I look forward to seeing what other gems I discover.