An Occasional Correspondent sends this along...
I can only WISH I'd seen an error message like that last night when my desktop went belly up. There I was... installing Microsnot updates on the box when it froze. I waited about five minutes to make sure it wasn't going to unfreeze and proceed with the task at hand... nothing. So I did a hard shut-down and rebooted. The result? Blue screen o' death. Bill Gates has a macabre sense of humor, since this particular iteration of the BSOD told me to check my computer for viruses and run CHKDSK/F if all else fails. Three times, even. Enquiring Minds™ REALLY wanna know how the f*ck I can do that when the OS won't load...
Take it to a shop, and pray to God that you've had sense enough to subscribe to Carbonite & keep your program install disks.
ReplyDeleteNo damn wonder I couldn't leave you a comment on your last couple of post~ At least I tried :-)
ReplyDeleteHope you can get it fixed.
Andy: I'm backed up locally to an outboard hard drive. And I ran a full back-up Sunday night, so all should be fine. It's just a major PITA to be livin' off the laptop until after the holidays.
ReplyDeletess: Blogger been rather cantankerous of late -- it ain't ME. Said with the understanding that it's never me, of course.
Naw, it ain't just you, Buck. A couple of days ago I couldn't "sign in," and had to comment anonymously a couple of places.
ReplyDeleteSucks.
Yeah, I remember you mentioning before that you backed up locally. Probably a good idea, even though I've never done it. Carbonite did save my arse though a couple of years back. Had an out of the blue hard drive failure. Dang, I sure was glad I had bit on the radio ads!
I've thought about an on-line backup service once or twice. But I always wonder how long it would take to back up almost 300 GB of data across these here inter-tubes. I'm thinkin' it would be sumthin' like FOREVER. Ergo, we've gone local, like always. Even THAT takes a couple o' hours to run a full back-up, incrementals only take ten minutes or so.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how long it would take to restore that much data.
ReplyDeleteFact is, I don't know how much data I had when I had to make use of my online back up. I had about 2300 Kodak photos, all my business files & my Dad's business files (which were almost nothing in the big scheme of things really), and a bunch of scanned treasures that probably took a bit of space. But, I'm not sure.
The whole restoration process to my new machine took about three hours, if memory serves.
I'd probably do myself well to get an external hard drive, too. But, I probably won't. It would be way down on the bottom of the list, seeing as Carbonite just automatically charges me annually and does its thing, and I don't have to make a trip to a store.
The no trip to the store deal being the mostest reason it's on the bottom of the list.
The cloud can be great, but hackers can get into those servers too. Do you really want your tax-returns up in the cloud. And as a cautionary tale, just one word: Magnolia.
ReplyDeleteMagnolia was a cloud-based book-mark storage site cum shareware that was a niche product more flexible than Delicious also combining stumble-upon like features. It had a server-farm meltdown w.o. any back-up of its own and EVERYTHING EVERYONE had stored there was irretrievably lost. I think the belt (local and suspenders (cloud) approach is probably the best way to go, all things considered..
Andy: I hear ya. I avoid most sorts o' shopping, too.
ReplyDeleteVirgil: I don't trust my tax returns with anyone except me and the IRS. Well, and TurboTax. ;-)