Back up your files

In a word, ugh.

So I just spent the last ten days dealing with the fact that my computer blew up on Thursay, the 10th. I should have seen it coming, since it had been making a weird noise for several weeks, but it still kind of knocked me sideways. First, the monitor went blank, then there was a loud pop. Suddenly, all you could hear was the case fans, then those died too. After that, I switched the power off in back of the PC. I figured the power supply had blown, and I was right, but that wasn't all.

Elements lost in the meltdown:

motherboard
2 internal hard drives
power supply
scanner (USB)
keyboard
video card
USB card
firewire card (not entirely fried, but spotty)

Elements that survived:

CPU
RAM
printer
mic (USB)
external hard drive (USB)
sound card
monitor
modem
speakers
floppy drive (I got a new one anyway)
mouse (ditto, since it came with the keyboard)
camera cradle (USB)

As you can see, it could have been worse. On the other hand, since I had to replace the motherboard I went ahead and got the latest model, meaning I also had to upgrade my CPU and RAM, which aren't cheap. So far it's cost me about $680 to get back up to speed.

The worst part is, if I can't recover one of the hard drives, I'll have lost all the digital photos I've taken since September 2004, including the murals I shot over the summer. And all the songs I'd recorded. Not to mention all my business records and a couple of things I've written that were saved on a floppy disk that won't read for some reason. Sigh.