Mild Irritation and a Lesson Learned

Happy day, my computer upgrade arrived Monday! I dashed home after work to set it all up, and thought maybe I'd start putting my Ireland book together. I started to run the upgrade, when Aunt S-- called, so I left it to run and went into the bedroom to chat. We had quite a bit of catching up to do, so an hour and a half later I went back to check on the upgrade, only to find there had been an error, and it asked to restart the computer and try the upgrade again. I figured maybe I had missed a request for a password or some such and it waited too long for me to get off the phone. I ran the upgrade again, only to have it stop and give me an error message again. Huh. So I ran the upgrade again and watched to where it stopped, and ran it a fourth time to make sure that it stopped in the same place again.

Last night I called Apple to talk with their Tech Support. I asked if it may have had something to do with the upgrade disc, and the girl assured me that there couldn't be anything wrong with the disc, even though we ran 2 different diagnostic checks on my computer, and both of those said there was nothing wrong with the computer.

**sigh**

Long story not as short as it should be, it boiled down to the only fix for my computer that they could come up with was to erase the computer and start over fresh. Which means that anything that I hadn't backed up is now gone. I'm fairly sure that I had everything of any great importance on a CD, but there is always that lingering doubt now that there may have been something that I missed, and I won't know until I get all my CDs out and the files reinstalled onto my computer. The lesson learned here is to make doubly sure that every time I add photos to my computer, that I put them on a clearly marked CD. I think I lost some pics of Sheba and Sasha, the last trip that I took to WDW (including the postcard shot of the castle), M----'s and my last trip to NYC, and I think the pics from the cruise in 2006 with C---. Luckily I had my Ireland pictures backed up a couple of times over, and once I start going through those pics, I may find more of some of my more recent pics as well. Here's hoping.

It's an unfortunate loss, but one that has helped me learn to better manage my files in the future, so that's a good thing. As I try to find the positive in anything anymore, that's how I'm looking at this; I'll be sure to back my files up better from now on out.