Tuesday 16 June 2009

Crash and burn!

A total disaster here. The main PC in our house has lost my complete user profile due to a virus (only mine,no one else's). All The Yellow Room date, documents etc has gone (no back up), the website (which I can't update, as I've now lost Dreamweaver), all my email contacts and address book, my ITunes library including music I'd paid to download, all the short stories and articles I'd ever written. Fortunately, most of my novel was backed up on a memory stick.

It feels like the modern day equivalent to a house fire! Not quite as disastrous, admittedly.

I don't know where to start. I'm using Nige's laptop at present and if you need to email me, then it's qwfeditor@yahoo.co.uk.

I was going to update this blog yesterday telling you all about my lovely weekend at The Althorp Literary Festival, but all the photos I took were on the main PC. I'm trying to get some of them off the memory card onto this laptop, but I'm not the greatest when it comes to technical stuff.

I feel like crying... then going out and buying a Mac!

7 comments:

Oldrightie said...

Jo, there are hard drive recovery systems and experts. Try googling this info, "hard drive data recovery"

Jo said...

Thanks, Mike! Nige is pretty good at doing this, but he has so little time. I'll let you know how it goes. Hope all is well with you and Carole!
We're off to Cheltenham this weekend for a belated anniversary celebration.

Jane Smith said...

Jo, that's horrid. But try not to start weeping just yet.

What ever you do don't yet run any utilities which will restore the hard drive: it might reformat it in the process, and you'll have no chance of recovering any of it.

I managed to extricate everything from a failed hard drive a while ago: it did involve removing it from its computer, having access to another computer, and spending twenty quid, but I didn't lose a single thing.

http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/search?q=failed+hard+drive

If you think that might be a help you could email me your phone number and I'll phone you back to talk it through: "hprw at tesco dot net" will reach me.

If you can still use the other profiles on the computer, have you run your anti-virus program? If that's not working then Kaspersky has an excellent online virus checking facility that you could run; and if all else fails try the malware forum: ask for help, and try to wait patiently for advice--they can take a few days to get back to you but do usually manage to strip out every last byte of malignant code from yoru computer:

http://malwareremoval.com/forum/

Rachel Green said...

What terrible news. So sorry to hear that, Jo.

Data recovery will get most, if not all, of it back.

Joanna said...

If you email iTunes support, you can download all the songs you bought, if you bought them from the iTunes store.

ginny Swart said...

Jo thats horrible, but Im SURE you can recover your stuff. Then say "Back-up"! If you're not going to switch immediately to a Mac.. try using Mozyhome ( Mozyhome.com) You download the programme, set it to back up twice a day and it copies ALL your stuff and stores it somewhere in outerspace until you crash and burn again. Then you get it back. All free. The first time it copies all your documents it takes HOURS but after that, a breif half minute depending on how many documents you've changed in the past 12 hours.
Did you lose the comp entries too? Sniff sniff. Ginny Swart

Jo said...

Thanks everyone for your advice. Good old Nige managed to retrieve everything (well, almost!), so all is not lost and it's now well and truly backed up. Comp entries are fine. Must update blog tomorrow!