Moments of Permanence - August 9th, 2009

About August 9th, 2009

:insert screaming here: 04:26 pm
You know what's even better than your computer starting to have trouble recognising peripherals?

When your computer stops being able to boot.

At all.

What's really impressive is that I can't even get into the BIOS screen. It doesn't get far enough into the boot process TO GET TO THE BIOS.

How much uni work do I have to do in the next few days?

That would be "a lot".

Fortunately, though I hadn't finished backing up all my data, I *had* successfully backed up:

1) My /2009/ directory, which contains all of this year's uni work. Which has backups in prior stages, but this means that even my latest transcriptions etc for Field Linguistics are saved.

2) My /images/DSLR/ directory, including my latest rounds of photos - not least, the last round of shots of [livejournal.com profile] harveystoat, which would be annoying at the least, and impossible at worst, to reshoot.

While it's still possible I'll lose some data if the hard drive is somehow unrecoverable or something, I won't lose anything important.

This is why I buy external hard drives - because just keeping copies of everydamnthing is easy, and I don't have to try and manage storage of large numbers of DVDs, or whatever other medium I tried to keep backups on. Or trying to keep up with incremental changes to files, etc.

So I'm working on my essay using Chas's computer. Which is rather sub-optimal, even though I have the files I need on my external hard drive. It doesn't feel right, it's not as comfortable a setup for me either in terms of the arrangement of files, software, and software preferences on the relevant machine, or in terms of physical resilience to my pain issues. Add to that the fact that I'm sleeping terribly at the moment, and you have me struggling to write the essay in unfamiliar ways - I'm having difficulty pulling together all the sources I need, so what I'm more-or-less doing now is writing a very rough draft, outlining a structure and general arguments, to which I will have to go back and add elaborations and references and sources.

I'm trying not to succumb to just feeling depressed about all this, but it's hard. Fortunately I had the chance to back up properly, or it might well be impossible.
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