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I Eat Hard Drives for Breakfast

You may have noticed I was quiet last week.  No posts.  No newsletter for those that are subscribed. (You should be one of those people.  Sign up on the right tool bar.)  It’s been a long week.

I was noticing my computer was a little off the week before last and the fan was running all the time like I was downloading something crazy.  I knew everything wasn’t right with the world but I have an older computer and I was in denial.  It isn’t like a new computer is in the budget right now so I was just kind of hoping it lasted until  it might be in the budget.  About two weeks ago everything slowed down enough to remind me of my teenage days with dial-up. Since I had this tech support program from the Geek Squad with 2 computers left I figured it would be better to bring the thing in for a checkup before it blew up.

I should have known.  My hard drive was dying.

You see, this is my third hard drive in 3 or 4 years between 2 laptops.  That is not including the hard drives that came with the computer. It’s been an ongoing mess because I bought a crappy computer that died almost right away.  When Sony lost it (yes no one knows where it went),  Best Buy had given me another one because I complain loudly.  And this is the second hard drive I have had to replace in this computer.  So at this point I am getting good at the process.

The most important thing I have learned is to backup your stuff!!!  I thought I was backing things up the first time with Norton but it turned out, no.  I lost lots of pictures that time and formed a deep hatred of Norton.  Last time I brought the hard drive in before it melted so they did a data transfer onto an external drive.  It was nice not to lose stuff but it’s kind of a process.  This time I knew I had just run a whole system backup on the external hard drive a few weeks ago so I should be fine. When I tried to restore everything at once my computer argued with me.  It’s a lovely way to spend your birthday.

But this time I had been smart.  Like really smart.  So much so I am patting myself on the back as we speak.  Last summer I signed up for Carbonite.  I had read a lot of great reviews about it and heard a lot of the other bloggers used it.   Carbonite is a service that backs up all the files (pictures, documents) and even your internet bookmarks and saves them in the cloud.   It does it automatically, i.e. you can be lazy and it’s ok.  You can access the files online which can come in handy when you are out somewhere and forget something.

This weekend Carbonite was put to the test.  I asked it to restore everything it had back to where it used to be.  It told me it would take about 3 days and to make sure to leave my computer on.  That was it.

So yesterday afternoon it was done.  All my photos were back, and there are tons from all the furniture and the kid.   He and Opie are pretty cute and I can’t help myself.  The files were all in the corrects folders with no need to rearrange.  There was a small glitch restoring my Chrome bookmarks (my fault I think) but the online chat fixed that.  The help desk logged on to my computer and fixed it right away.  For free.

This isn’t a sponsored post and I’m not being paid to tell you all this.  I have just gone through this mess so many times and Carbonite made this whole process a breeze in comparison.  I figured I would share and maybe save someone else’s pictures.

If you are interested in Carbonite click this referral link and when you sign up we can both get a $20 gift card to a list of stores (I think Amazon & Target are on the list).

Also, check out Ebates here (my affiliate link).  It basically gives you a kick back if you stop at their website before shopping somewhere.  Now they have made it easier with a little button you can add to your internet toolbar that prompts you when you get to a website that has cash back.  I don’t do a lot of shopping these days but I have racked up almost $100 in cash back.  You pay nothing and they send you real checks.  On Carbonite you get 5% cash back.

So now I am back up and running.  I took a ton of pictures for all the projects I have been working so now I can show off in the new posts coming soon.

 

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