Random Topic Generator: Could’ve Been Worse

Midway through Monday morning it proved to me what specific week I was going to get. I was plodding along merrily with my work and getting things organised and scheduled when my external hard drive decided to start acting funny, and then upon booting up, it started to make this strange clicking noise, as if the needle is struggling to attach to the disk to read any of the data. That means my external hard drive has packed up. That means I’ve lost a lot of data. That means I wasn’t as intelligent with my data as I should have been.

You can probably predict what I’m about to say next. Whilst a good portion of my data was backed up, the other portion has been lost. During that moment when my hard drive started making that noise, I completely forgot that I had even backed up some of my work and truly believed it was all lost. Over the next couple of days, I’ve spent as many hours as I can either making sure that every other bit of data I have on my computer across every hard drive I’ve got installed has been backed up properly, or trying to find what can actually be recovered via either reinstalling, re-downloading, and/or retaking from people whose copied some data from their computers. A huge amount of data can be recovered from various sources I was pleased to find.

I’ve lost my videos that I’ve either edited or downloaded, which equates to over 100, all the blog posts that I’ve written since the beginning, all my stories that I’ve written, all my Audiobooks, all the documents relating to physics, quantum mechanics, and advanced calculus, and all my college work from a couple of years ago. In total, I’ve lost 500GB+ of data.

However, the videos I’ve edited have been uploaded to YouTube, and all the videos I’ve downloaded can simply be re-downloaded again. It will take a good while to get all 100+ videos back, but at least they won’t be gone forever. All the blog posts that I’ve written since the beginning have been uploaded to the blog – I don’t delete anything I’ve written. I kept them because it would be easier for me to look back when I need to, but mainly because I don’t delete anything I’ve written as I do put my time an effort into making each piece of writing. All the documents relating to various aspects of science I found from various sources, which I know exactly where they are, so I can simply get them back as well. My Audiobooks I actually brought from the Humble Audiobook Bundle a couple of days ago, so they’re just sitting there, waiting for me to download them again. My stories and my college work I have backed up anyway, so I have lost them at all.

What I have lost that I wouldn’t mind getting back somehow are my pictures, but even then, a good portion of them has been uploaded to my blog in the 1,000 Words and Jerry’s Journal sections, so I can get them back easy enough. It’s those that I haven’t uploaded I wouldn’t mind getting back. If I’m unfortunate enough not to be able to, then that’s just life.

It’s a massive shock to my work and day-to-day life with the data being lost, and it is disappointing, but I’m not as angry as I was at first with myself because I can get about 80% or more back over time. Compared to what I could have lost forever, I’m considering that as a positive outcome.

Now I can write so many words about how important backing up your data is, but most of you already know that and don’t want to be constantly told that, and to those that wouldn’t mind hearing out what I have to say regarding the matter; but instead I’m going to say only a few words but will get straight to the point and explain all that I need to.

BACKUP YOUR DATA.

That is all.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)