At any rate, this is (or was) our only home computer, so Amber will not be checking e-mail until I get it back up again (and the blog posts will probably slow down also).
Of course, we hadn't backed up anything. Usually I backup to CD every year on my birthday in August. But Audrey was born this past October and is only 7 months old, so none of our pictures of her were backed up anywhere!
Fortunately, it looks so far like I'm going to be able to recover everything. How easy it will be to reconstruct the computer is another problem. I guess we'll see.
So, if you're reading this, take this opportunity to think about how you'd feel if your computer went down. How often do you backup? Do you know how to recover? None of the Microsoft-supplied solutions like System Restore have helped at all in our case. Most failures happen like ours--isolated bad sectors, but sometimes, the drive electronics go down, which is far worse. I'm told average life expectancy for hard drives these days can be as low as 5 years. After our machine is back up I'm certainly going to revisit our backup process and probably invest in an external hard drive. I know there are other solutions like mozy that we may also look into.
Incidentally, while I'm recovering Audrey's pictures off our old drive, it's interesting to do some statistics:
- She just turned 7 months old, and we have a total of 18.9 GB of content just of her
- This includes 141 movies--though most of the movies are still on our handicam and aren't reflected in this number
- This includes 4,912 pictures! Of course this excludes pictures we've had taken professionally of her, which thankfully are stored on DVD.
- This includes 141 movies--though most of the movies are still on our handicam and aren't reflected in this number
- That's 3.15 GB of content per month
- If we continue to catalogue Audrey's life at this rate, assuming a lifetime of 80 years, that's 3,024 GB, 4,320 CDs, or 644 DVDs worth of information
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