Hey, guys. Sorry, I have some bad news. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, I’ve been stressing about it most of last night.
Basically, my desktop hard drive failed. This is the machine that has Photoshop, my scanner and everything else that makes Theater Hopper possible loaded on it. So, my hands are tied in terms of uploading anything new.
You might be asking how I’m uploading this blog post. Fortunately, our laptop still works and we’re able to draw a wireless signal from our router. But everything else is pretty much off the board at this point.
The good news right now is that I have everything backed up. So all of my old Theater Hopper artwork, family photos and video, all of our music, my job application data has all been saved to external hard drives. So I haven’t lost anything important.
Right now, it’s just a matter of finding the time to purchase and install a new hard drive before loading everything back onto it.
I’m watching Henry all day today and I have to study for my accounting mid term for Tuesday. So there is definitely a lot on my plate right now. All I can ask for is patience while I try to get myself re-situated.
The timing of this hard drive failure is kind of serendipitous. Some of you might remember that I experienced a similar situation last year and launched a huge donation drive to help me recover all of the data I lost.
Well, things aren’t as bad this time around, but there are still several of you that I owe artwork to as part of your donations.
Believe me, I’m embarrassed that it has taken me more than a year to get this artwork to you. But I want everyone that I still owe artwork to know that I haven’t forgotten about them. I still have everyone’s information and fully intend on completing my end of the bargain. All I can say in my defense is that 2009 has not been a very good year for me and it has been very, very difficult just to keep my head above water.
No one is putting pressure on me, or anything. So I have to say thank you for everyone being so understanding. But I’m putting pressure on myself and I want to get the work done. So I will do my best to deliver the artwork that I owe people in the near future.
Thanks again for your patience and understanding, follow me on Twitter if you want the latest updates and I will be in touch with everyone soon.
In the meantime, if you have suggestions or want to leave comments about how I can amend my hard drive situation, please feel free.
If you want to get something off of your broken hard drive i.e. get it working for a few minutes, try getting it really cold. Stick it in the freezer for a while, then plug it in and try to keep it cold. Something about the discs contracting makes this work sometimes..
Thank god for backups though. Try not to stress too much and focus on the important things; no one here is going to stop reading or love the comic any less.
Someone told me about the freezer trick the last time my hard drive crash, but I’ve heard different suggestions for exactly how long to leave it in the freezer. Would you say a few minutes is 3 minutes? 5 minutes?
Like I said, I think got everything that was important, but there is an itch in the back of my brain making me wonder if I grabbed everything.
I’ll tell you one thing: I got lucky yesterday morning. I was receiving no drive detected errors, but managed to get my computer started up. I grabbed the most recent Theater Hopper files, photos, videos and music files. I also made sure to grab all of my school papers as well as my resume information. That information was something that I did not back up in the past. Man, am I glad I grabbed those files. I would have been REALLY mad if I had lost those forever!
But, yeah. Once I have the new drive installed and Vista set up on it, I might try the freezer trick just to double check.
In the meantime, I’m totally reassessing my backup strategy – putting everything that needs to be backed up into one folder, looking at online storage houses like Mozy or CrashPlan. Burning stuff to CD and putting it in a lock box… Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy!
Sorry to read about your hard drive, that is a major loss. I lost my hard drive at work several monthes ago and didn’t back anything up thinking it was auto saved by my employer. Boy was I wrong and a few tears were shed. My IT guys did the freezer trick and they left it in overnight. I now e-mail important personal files to my home e-mail and disk the rest.
Good luck in getting everything fixed.
Wow, looks like I wasn’t the only one that had computer problems yesterday. Though yours is more serious. I couldn’t get the computer to load under my name for an hour. I’m now using it under my mom’s name and it works perfectly. I just have to rebookmark everything…which sucks. Anyway, I feel for you and hope you can get your computer issues fixed soon. Til then, don’t stress. Real life matters more than what goes on in the internet.