It had to happen sometime, I suppose. For the first time ever since I’ve been working on a computer – about 17 years now – a hard drive has bombed out on me.
AAAARGH!
My iMac, the one my Dad sold to me a few years ago, has given up the ghost. The HDD hasbeen sent off to datarecovery specialists to see if they can retrieve anything. God, I hope so!
I have 11 years’ worth of PST files on there (all my email and notes), along with my traffic control sheets and the site design that I’ve been working on for 2 days. That’s the important stuff. I don’t mind about the rest, I can survive without it but I’ll be pretty upset if I lose those 3 things. Luckily, I backup most of my stuff to an external drive and all our important files are hosted on a server and backed up nightly, so that’s all good.
Anyhoo … I’m busy working on an old laptop at the moment (thank goodness I have spare machines!) but I can’t design on it so that’s a bit of a problem. And I don’t have email running yet. I’ll have to set that up and configure it to leave all my mails on the server. Urgh, when I eventually get my machine back, I’m going to have to redownload it all.
Jeesh, this is SUCH a pain! And I’m feeling completely disorientated working on a “foreign” computer.
I’m thinking about taking the plunge of leaving my Mac (when it comes back) as a Mac, and not installing Bootcamp. It’s a bit scary though as I haven’t worked on a Mac for many years! I can get most of the software I need for free – it’s just Photoshop that I’ll have to worry about licensing. I’ll also have to find a way to get all the stuff off my external HDD and then reformatting it so the Mac can read it. And then there’s the issue of email … if I get all my PST files back, what the hell do I do with them? If I don’t get them back, well, so be it.
This is absolutely the WORST time for my drive to have crashed and burned. We are so so so busy and now it looks like I’m going to have to sweat blood next week to try and make up for lost time. Buggeration!
Well, that’s my sorry story at the moment.
Oh, before I forget … have you voted for me in the Nerdies yet? If not, PLEASE click here to cast your vote for “Cow_Grrrl” (that’s me) and help me win!
Onwards and upwards,
xxx
Sheesh Angel … it’s SUCH a pain!
Luckily, I haven’t lost EVERYTHING – I keep a lot of stuff on my external drive – my photos and all my music is safe, thank Gary the Duck! And I’ve also got my image collections and Photoshop extras there as well, which is a relief – it’s taken me years to build all that up.
So … I’m getting my machine back tomorrow. Guess what yours truly is going to be doing all day? Yup, installing, installing, configuring and installing.
Blech.
Oh I know that feeling all too well… and I lost EVERYTHING when it happened to me, there was no recovery possible.
Well, I just heard back from the data recovery company and they can’t get anything off my drive.
It’s well and truly fucked.
As am I.
.pst files are pesky but there is a little $10 app that will convert them into mboxes that can be imported into Thunderbird of Mail.app. I’ve done it personally for a friend who have over 5gb of pst madness and it all worked fine.
Mail-wise, for a company your size, you should think abour running Google Apps. You can configure Gmail on your domain for all your guys and then your stuff is instantly accessible even if your machines has a kaboom.
Dont use ‘BootCamp’ install a VM ( Virtual Machine ) and run your Windows Apps in there, The integration is so good you can even use something called Unity that comes with VMWare Fusion to run your Windows Apps outside of your VM in your Mac
If you get your PST files back and you intend using Office for Mac you can convert your PST Files to be readable inside Office for Mac which is Microsoft’s Office Suite Equivalent for the Mac platform
mhb
There is absolutely nothing worse than having a hard drive crash. I have had it happen once and you just feel helpless and it takes so much time and effort to get yourself back to where you were.
It’ll all come together 🙂