Friday, January 27, 2012

Computer Woes. . . Again



Please forgive me as I whine.

Last week Monday, I noticed my 9 month Apple Macbook Pro was really slow and wouldn't boot up IPhoto.  After rebooting multiple times, I booked the first available appointment at the Genius Bar for Wednesday.  And I actually remembered to back up everything on my external hard drive.

At the Genius Bar, the very nice Apple guy said the problem with Iphoto was my corrupted Iphoto library. Which means the hours I've spent tagging faces and retouching photos?  All wasted.  All gone.  None of it saved, even on the external hard drive.

We spent the next 2 hours waiting for my computer to transfer photos from somewhere to somewhere, I don't even know where.  Meanwhile, my computer ran slower and slower and slower until both Apple Geniuses who were working with me concluded it might be a failing hard drive.  Unfortunately, none were in stock, so they ordered a new one and said they hoped it would be in by Saturday.

Thursday morning I wrote my Patheos blog, interviewed a friend for my latest book idea, came up with more interview questions.  By Thursday evening, my computer stopped booting up at all.  It had died.

Thank God for Dropbox!  Dropbox is like the Cloud.  My Regional Leadership Team's using it to share documents with one another.  I've put all my work, writing and recipes in Dropbox, and every time I make a change, it saves it out on some server somewhere.  Because of Dropbox, I could continue working, cook my Chinese New Year's feast and didn't lose my new questions and interview.

To make a long story short (er), after the new hard drive finally showed up on Tuesday, I went home to transfer my back-up only to see they'd installed Lion, the newest operating system.  That was actually very generous of them, except that Lion won't run Entourage, where all my mailing lists, email lists, and old emails reside.

Back to the Mac store for 30 minutes, where they switched me back to Snow Leopard.  I went home, backed up, and then realized I backed up everything from my old computer, not the newest one.  AACK.

Yesterday afternoon I went back to the Genius bar for the 4th time in a week where they re-wiped my hard drive and told me to go home, restore my back-up using the right file and I should be all set.

Finally, after an entire week, I was overjoyed to see the smiling picture of our family in Hawaii on my desktop.  Then I opened Entourage only to find that none of my groups, categories, email folders or old emails exist anymore--the whole reason I couldn't use Lion.

Pray for me.  I need it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That is one of the great things about having a cloud storage. You could still have access to your files, even though your computer was in for repair. You don’t even have to worry about losing them, because they're safely backed up and waiting for you to download them in your new computer, if necessary.

Lillian Walker @ Taylor Works, Inc.