I wish I’d acted on this reminder to backup yesterday. Mid-evening yesterday, I was working on some slides for our next customer seminar, when my work laptop started slowing down very badly. I rebooted it, and it didn’t come back. I spent an hour or two trying various things as it sometimes would boot to the system menu, sometimes get as far as the progress bar during loading. Eventually, I gave up and went to bed – to no avail, since I was going over in my head all the things I had lost in the month since my last backup. Some time in the early hours I fell asleep, only to be woken up by Tiffany at 4:30am when she got up due to being ill.
At this point I gave up with sleep, got up and tried again – totally dead PC, booted for about 3 seconds before automatically rebooting. BIOS diagnostics said “no hope, your hdd is a gonner”. I just left it looping and gave up, not even motivated to switch it off. Then, about 30 minutes later I looked to see it at the login screen! I plugged in the external HDD, and 30 minutes later had backup up all the important stuff. It was the last flicker of life, and I had saved my work – hurrah.
Dell were great, I rang up the Gold support line and within 5 minutes they had accepted the fact I had a genuine HDD failure and had arranged for a courier to deliver a new one for tomorrow. Great.
I might set the alarm tonight, after the lack of sleep last night I don’t want to be lying there worrying about over sleeping!
tags: home computing work |