Closing in on a Dealine? Well, then, expect the upexpected!

Yup. Expect it.

Expect that your back up hard drives will fail as you transfer large amounts of data. Expect some or all of any major program you use to refuse to open or close at your mouse click. Expect that even a power outage will unfold after the storm hits and whilst the birds are chirping peacefully. Yes- a very unlikely power outage.

Expect it all, with or without luck, because it happens.
I'm a recent survivor of it.

This past week has been a handful of technical nightmares. Have you ever heard of the movie "The Mangler" by Stephen King? Well, prepare that the computer could be like that, and also its artillery of hardware, and proceed with caution while forging toward a finish line.

The closer the finish line is the more defensive courses of action one must have stuffed up their sleeve.

Because even in being safe-- now I can officially say that back up drives will fail, too. And investing your money in one super-duper large external drive and dragging everything from pictures to your life's work in there has never quite been a smart approach to avoid malfunction, either. It would seem like the perfect option, but...

Remember, that the bigger they get now, the larger the size of the risk being taken. Right now, external drives fit 2TB of data. Huge. Do yourself a favor, and buy a bunch of mini 50-100 gig drives and store data for each folder subject, instead. That's what I'll be doing when I get some free time, I'll being backing up my back up!

I checked briefly for my data in my panic, and luckily most my work over the years was on another external drive even MORE senior that my *&!%!$#@! Seagate... While my newer work was packed away in a folder on my Desktop. (Yes, in these cases I'm grateful to have lazily stored folders on my desktop)

That *&!%!$#@! Seagate isn't even recognizable at the moment. And to think, that all this trouble stemmed from plugging the drive into my brother's netbook.

I believe Netbooks are fresh-off-the-shelf miniature virus vaults. Loathe them.

As far as why my computer was being temperamental, I took basic precautions and ran a series of scans and different tune-up options. I use BitDefender-- This antivirus software is a favorite for two reasons: It's very simple to use and it uses low processing power.

My computer hasn't flared up into any further fits thus far and my programs have been cooperating. Although, I will have to check more deeply into exactly what happened and go about finding the remaining files that need to be salvaged onto new hardware. Boring stuff.

First things first, meet the deadline and have my own lonesome wrap up party. A bottle of wine and Cheesecake Factory cheesecake?

At least, those files were not lost.