Hard copies, data entry and hard drive failure

I knew it was going to happen. I thought about backing up many times. It's not like I don't have the space --a couple "deck of cards" USB hard drives, other machines and a terabyte of server space. But no, I didn't simply throw my "picaxe" folder anywhere but on my lappy.

And then came the virus. Something hit my computer like I have never seen before... I could not go online as I got a "this site is unsafe" warnings the warning pages themselves prevented me from going any further. I could not run any anti-virus/spywhere software as I got a warning there too that prevented opening them. Everything merged to a constant "would you like to purchase anti-virus software now?" pop-ups. When I clicked yes, I was brought to one of the most poorly disguised, fake-AVG, phishing expedition I have ever seen. Really, it should have just said "We just stole your computer --we are not going to give it back but give us your credit card information anyway. --I swear, it asked for bank account numbers "for varification" in additon to the credit card. --As you can guess, Paypal was not accepted.

Long story short, total hard drive wipe. Reformat disc. I lost it all. Now, mind you the really important stuff is backed up, i.e. music etc. but I did loose every line of code I have ever written in both picaxe and processing and in terms of Walter, I have grown very accustomed to cutting and pasting MUCH more that writing anything new. Alas.

Now, for the punchline. WHO'S MAKIN' FUN OF MY HARD COPIES NOW, SUCKA?!?! Oh yeah, I am going to be a data-entry guy for a while but man, at least I still have it.

This post was mostly for rik.

’bout those backups

Sorry to hear about your troubles chris. Also sorry to hear you wiped the drive. You might have tried replacing it with an empty one, reinstall and then connect the infected drive with a USB cable to get the data off.

I use sugarsync.com for backing up source code. The great thing about it is that it backs up to an online storage place, each time a file is changed or written to the harddrive. So everytime you hit save in the picaxe editor (or any other editor or program) you see a sync icon spin for a few seconds and the file is backed up somewhere on the internet. If you close the laptop before everything is stored safely, it’ll pick up where it left of when you start it up again.

So much for the hindsight wisdom. Tough luck