Gather 'round and I shall tell you a tale... OF STUPIDITY
Now that I'm done crying and I have a plan (although an expensive one) and some reassurance from a professional that all is probably not lost, I guess I'll make a post about the past 24 trauma-filled hours. Let my stupidity be a lesson to you all!
My laptop is hosed. The linux partition has vanished from sight. There are some disk errors there. That happens to be the partition where Everything That Has Ever Mattered™ resides. Everything I've ever written, including a poem/children's book I wrote on Wednesday. Any pics I hadn't quite gotten up on flickr yet. All the graphics, fonts, etc. that I use for jewelry sites, blogs, and such. The backups of my twitter account, including every #ThingsJonahSays...
If I keep listing, I'm going to cry again.
Anyway, as of last night it was gone. Irretrievable. I collapsed in upon myself a little bit as tiny reactions came in waves like stages of grief. I took a hot shower, ate some yogurt and went to bed, looking up data recovery services on my phone for solace.
The crazy thing was, I was trying to boot my machine to start backing everything up. For reasons I won't get into now, I became concerned the night before that I had not been utilizing the various services I have access to for their backup applications. But I was literally a day late and I'm going to be a few hundred dollars short.
Backup your files early and often, kids.
Seriously, I. Am. Stupid. We have a 3+ terabyte raid 5 server in the closet for this very purpose. I have an Amazon cloud drive, google docs, and a dropbox account and I have Flickr for photos and video. There is no excuse for any file on my machine to be the only copy of anything. But it didn't occur to me to back it up. I say again: I AM STUPID!
So, this morning I talked to one data recovery service and he seemed completely unphased, calling it straightforward and sounding very confidant about being able to restore the data from the damaged partition. I'll be making a couple of other calls to get pricing. They gave me an example of similar jobs they've done recently which compare in size & OS, and they're pricey but doable and worth it. It may prove to be cheaper, since we're dealing with the smallest partition and I provided the entire harddrive capacity for the quote. But, we're still probably looking at $200-500. :/
Learn from my mistakes. Backup in multiple secure locations on a regular basis or prepare to fork out the cost of a new machine to recover your data.
And then there's that... I'm going to have to either replace the harddrive or the laptop even after all the data recovery business is out of the way. Chris said he had a harddrive around, so I might do that & get a new battery & be done with it.
*Fingers crossed* that my hope is not misplaced.
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