My laptop is in a million little pieces on our living room floor. Last night I spilled Diet Dr. Pepper on it and fried it. Technically, I don't know for sure that it is gone, but the screen was frying as Greg was trying to pull the power. Unfortunately, I recently went through my email and downloaded a bunch of files in order to clean out my email. The plan was to then back up everything and reformat the laptop in the next couple of weeks. The hard drive appears to be okay (Greg took the entire computer apart and the hard drive wasn't wet at all).
I don't hardly ever drink soda anymore, and I never drink it that late a night. I literally sat down to check email for just a minute, and before I knew it I was sobbing on the phone to Melissa while Greg was taking the laptop apart. Luckily, this did not happen in the middle of a semester (or worse at the end of a semester). However, there were a LOT of files on that laptop that I don't have backed up elsewhere. Dissertation materials, syllabi and teaching materials, gradebooks, conference papers, primary research, and 6 years of grad school work. I have several documents on my flash drive (Thanks to the fact that in order to print at work, we had to use a computer that wasn't connected to the internet).
I'm probably going to send out a mass email to colleagues and professors with a "if you have anything" will you please send it back to me plea. Then I'm saving everything to Google Docs. Looks like I will be computer shopping sooner than I had planned.
2 comments:
Oh no! That's so horrible. I'm so paranoid about backing up now because massive data losses have always felt so much worse than I ever expected they would.
On the plus side, the hard drive itself might be okay, at least such that it could be plugged into another computer long enough to get important data off.
Sorry to hear about your laptop! But saw on twitter that you're going to try out Google Docs, let us know how that goes!
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