Today I learnt a massive lesson to always back up.

Not every now and then, not once a project has finished, constantly. And I sense a new obsessive compulsive action on my behalf coming along.

Yesterday as I was designing, as I was just moving one image across a page, my trusty but old MacBook died. An error came up telling me to restart. It just died. I freaked out, but I thought I could fix it, and I had just backed up alot of files that morning.

I run Time Machine, we have a nas backup system in place, things could have been worse. But of course there is always a couple of things that have been accidently forgotten about, that hasn’t been backed up. Luckily for me these things were all personal projects, things that have taken a couple of hours max. I started thinking about all the old photos, the uni projects, the programs that I don’t even use, the files that I really should have just deleted or archived.

There wasn’t much hope; but still, I wasn’t giving up.

I looked up how to recover my files as my MacBook wouldn’t restart. Turns out that Mac’s can transfer files onto other macs using a FireWire cable. Of course it was past 5pm on a Sunday and not much was open, as all my friends are PC users noone had a FireWire cable. Looked in Officeworks, Coles, Safeway and nothing. Went home and stressed all night waiting for the morning; Dick Smith sold me one for $5 – awesome. This will solve it, right?

Follow the instructions on YouTube, it’s all working as it says, great. And now the hard drive should show up on my mac’s desktop…. except that took about an hour. They both made alot of noise, lots of spinning wheels, and lots of hope…. 5 hours later and no, not much luck at all.

New plan, lets forget the lost data and re-install Snow Leopard with the help of my brother in law. Problems, lots of problems with my hard drive that can not be fixed. Lots of errors, but hope that my hard drive is ok. For now. Except it just doesn’t work.

My husband now comes home with a new hard drive and new hope. It’s all good, we are all on a mission. And then it needs special screws that we don’t have, and of course now it’s past 5pm again. Calling bunnings and electrician and IT friends, and yes. We have a solution!!

My MacBook is now empty and running fantastically. Makes me want to just surf the internet and not keep anything on it at all.