miraculous reprieve!

[edenfalling]

I got to Best Buy, explained the problem, and asked for a refund.

...which, luckily, it turns out I will not need, since the way they do data transfers is to first move data from the old computer to their own machines, and then copy it to the new machine or external drive. And they save their copy for thirty days. I was then afraid that they hadn't copied the data off my old computer at all, but fortunately they had -- they just didn't then finish the process and put it on my external hard drive. The Geek Squad manager apologized and began the transfer process immediately.

Best Buy's transfer process takes a LOT longer than normal USB transfers, apparently because they are sacrificing speed for accuracy. So I then spent an hour getting some other mall errands out of the way (I replaced enough old bras that I shouldn't need to bother with lingerie shopping for another two years, yay! I bought five boxes of Thin Mints from a Girl Scout who had set up a table near Target, yay! I finally found proper replacements for the silver hoop earrings my asshole burglar stole five years ago, yay!), ate a belated lunch, and went back to check. The transfer was only about half finished, so I caught the last #13 bus of the day home and will pick up my drive tomorrow when I do my weekly grocery run.

I sincerely hope somebody gets chewed out over this, but I am very glad that I will not, after all, be losing two and a half years of work -- which would translate to 300,000+ words of fiction (much of it unfinished, unposted, and thus unreconstructable) and probably another 50,000+ words of background world-building, outlines, analysis posts, etc.

...

I installed Avast's free antivirus program last night. It came with an option to install Dropbox, which I accepted. I think web backups would be a wise and useful safeguard, going forward.

Comments

[heliopausa]

Wonderful!! :D I am very glad indeed!

[edenfalling]

Thank you. So am I!

[lady_songsmith]

Oh what a relief! I'm so glad you got it back, and I'm sure someone is going to catch an earful over it.

[edenfalling]

A big relief! And yes, if the person responsible does not get chewed out, I would be quite surprised. (Well. Maybe not surprised surprised, because chain stores, but there is generally at least an attempt toward professionalism.)

[branchandroot]

Well thank goodness for that!

I use dropbox as my cloud backup, too, for everything but my financial documents folder. Works like a charm so far.

[edenfalling]

I am indeed thankful! (And yeah, I wouldn't go putting financial information out on the internet without some seriously heavy-duty security, but I don't think anyone's going to make money off my fanfiction or random photos of peppers and Ithaca Falls, so Dropbox should be pretty safe. *grin*)

[autumnia]

Excellent! I'm so glad to hear you'll get all your files back.

Hearing of experiences like these help to remind me that I should back up all my important data more often than I have. Do you also keep your files on an external drive? I keep two large (a 320GB and a 750GB) USB drives on hand but I really need to back up on a regular basis other than once a month.

[edenfalling]

I am very relieved myself!

I bought the external hard drive specifically to make backups of my files more regularly... and then never got around to doing so. *headdesk* I will try to be better about that from now on, for many reasons. (It will probably be less difficult to remember now, since the USB ports on my new laptop are more readily accessible than the ports on my old desktop. Convenience is a marvelous smoother of ways.)

[redwolf]

Happy to hear.

Love Dropbox. The stuff you're backing up is text so you shouldn't have an issue hitting their free limit and they do give you more space for adding more services. Another option is to use multiple free backup/sync services and share the load. Mozy is similar to Dropbox, but there's buckets more.

[edenfalling]

My experience with Dropbox thus far has been secondhand -- my dad uses it to share articles from his encyclopedia with the other editors -- but he has been very positive about the program so I figured it was generally trustworthy and functional. I am glad to hear that that impression was not mistaken!

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

A good end after all. But geez. Ugh.

[edenfalling]

Yes, it is a giant relief! But oh my god, they should have just done the transfer correctly the first time. I just. ARGH.

*collapses from a combination of relief and residual stress hormones*

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Best Buy. Yeah. But I'm so glad that they didn't screw it up completely and that your data is safe!

After the Great Hard Disk Crash of 2008, in which I lost about three months' worth of data -- including irreplaceable photos of my kids doing indoor skydiving* -- I became a complete fanatic about backing up. I finally set up Time Machine, which backs up to an external hard drive, and a year or two later I also signed up with ZipCould, which does a cloud backup every night. It's kind of like wearing a belt with suspenders, but I've never been much of a fashion queen anyway. ;-p

*Indoor skydiving:
http://sfbay.iflyworld.com/

[edenfalling]

I had a potential data-loss scare before, which is why I owned an external hard drive at all, but the USB ports on my old computer were inconvenient to access and I am lazy, so... I never really used it. *headdesk* I am not going to make that mistake again!

Indoor skydiving looks very fun. :-)