No, I’m not about to tell you all about my “itty bitty waist and round thing in your face”, (quite frankly i think you’ve all deal with that enough for this week :P).
Instead I will tell you a modern age horror story: I tried to open a file today with all my notes for the whole semester of work, and it was corrupted!!! Word did a better job at trying to restore it than it used to, but it was all crazy, looked like i’d been attacked by vicious “3″s everywhere, no formatting and lots of bits missing.
I had made a back-up a couple of days prior, BUUUUUUUT, that copy was also pooched. Or so I thought? I restarted the computer* – made a copy of the back-up copy, Word said there was an error but tried to open it anyway. IT WORKED! phew!
Now I was very lucky, as the previous backup was more than a month old. Kirsty, you may ask, you’re such a tech savvy girl (grins, you’re so nice to me), why would you not have automatic back-ups and the like? The answer is…. I dunno…. *shrugs sheepishly*
BUUUT, today I overheard a girl say that she’d set her automatic backup to copy her external hard drive to her internal one, which meant all her files were lost. That made me cringe.
This has been my community announcement. Remember what Joni Mitchell sang about data loss: “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”
(After my intellectual posting of a few days ago, I thought I should move onto some less important ramble.)
* As a computer science geek, I say the golden rule of fixing PCs is turn it off and turn it on again. I don’t care that doing so SHOULDN’T fix the problem, it tends to. People believe that spray-tan makes them tanned even though no-one knows why it does, why can’t people just be happy with “the computer likes to have a rest for a few moments and then he’ll feel up to doing work again”?!
it’s all well and good to restart, but when you say “I work in IT” and people reply “Oh, have you tried rebooting?”…. it gets a little embarrasing :D
I’ve never made backups >.>