plllog, I'm glad you got them back. Twice my computer crashed and twice I lost all my saved recipes so I know the feeling. I finally got mine onto thumb drives so I'm sure they are going to change computers and that won't work any more, much like my CDs are now obsolete and floppy disks are museum relics. (sigh)

Annie

hey, I've got some beta VCR tapes, an eight track player and six or eight cassette tape recorders (old reporter's gear) and hundreds of cassettes .... might could find a pogo stick, a hula hoop and my commodore vic 20 and the vic 1535 hard drive too ... along with my Sinclair computer and the old trash 80 with eight lines of text ... boat anchor material or lawn art ...

hey, I've got some beta VCR tapes, an eight track player and six or eight cassette tape recorders (old reporter's gear) and hundreds of cassettes .... might could find a pogo stick, a hula hoop and my commodore vic 20 and the vic 1535 hard drive too ... along with my Sinclair computer and the old trash 80 with eight lines of text ... boat anchor material or lawn art ...

Get a USB drive or external drives and download all your files, while your computer is still responsive.

Okay, to be fair, I should say there was/is nothing wrong with the hard drive and it's swappable. An external (I have one) wouldn't be any more compatible because of format changes. Any time this last 6 months I could have paid my tech guy to fix it. Probably would have taken him half an hour. I just was feeling icky and didn't want to deal, and knew I could fix it if I could work up the desire. :) I've been dodging some design work I was supposed to do (for free), but there's nothing like just wanting to check one little thing on an old recipe to make me fix the computer already. :)

OTOH, I do want to put the re.cipes in this spiffy new laptop, which is why I'm going to run them across on the 'net. I'm still going to need the old desktop for art stuff. I really don't like the newer programs I've been poking along with..

I don't have the old TRS-80, and the Sinclair was out of my price range (the TRS sort of came to me...I didn't have to buy it), but I can raise you an Atari with Frogger and a Merlin.

Good grief! I must really be in the 19th century! I couldn't even understand much of this discussion, but my general distrust of computers is why I keep everything I care about--recipes, photos, etc--on hard, paper copies. They're always where I put them and I can always find them. Real simple.

I use Backblaze for our laptops. That is a cloud backup service. Useful for laptops which aren't plugged into an external disk regularly enough to back up that way. Dear Daughter-san's laptop was stolen this summer - car window smashed in and briefcase taken - and Backblaze sent a drive with all her files. The service only backs up data, not system or applications. It can take a long time to complete the first backup to the cloud, because upload speed for home internet service is slow, but Backblaze just works away in the background until it's done.

The desktop Mac is backed up with Backblaze, Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive, and Time Machine to another external drive.

I don't trust Time Machine. It is convenient but once my Mac's drive failed and Time Machine WOULD NOT RESTORE. The restore process kept failing for some unknown reason in the middle of the night. After the third day of failed restores, SWMBO started asking, not entirely sweetly, if I'd lost all our photos of the kids dear?. I finally studied the log file and realized the process was failing at the same point each time. I estimated what hour of the night that was happening, set my alarm, got up and watched the process fail, and identified the particular file that Time Machine was failing on. I deleted that file from the backup - can't recall how - and then the next restore attempt ran properly. I was appalled that the process could be killed by a single malformed file, and added CCC to the backup regime. Eventually I got tired of carrying external drives to work in case of house fire, and added Backblaze.

I must confess I have no saved recipes. I either remember, or improvise, or find a recipe in a book or online, or never make the dish again. SWMBO has some saved recipes in a little box.

Sooz, thanks for the kind words. :)

Laceyvail, a lot of what was mentioned in the banter is actually 20th C. If you weren't dealing with computers back when they took up a whole room you wouldn't have known how special the little ol' Sinclair was. Hollerith cards, anyone? Cores? You know what you call a cricket in your vacuum tubes?

Thanks for all the backup suggestions. I do have hard copy of really important stuff, but you understand, finding what I wanted on backup would have required fixing the computer, right? Or doing the same amount of work to get it plugged into the laptop? And since there was never any harm to the drive, once I fixed the computer, I didn't need to go to backup to find it?

So, to be explicit, there was a corrupted TSR that was hanging up on loading. The first few times I went in to fix it, I was trying to repair it, then replace it, and it kept trying to phone home in distress, screwing up my modem. I'm pretty sure there weren't any viruses, just a sick little program doing unexpected things that made for recursive errors. I thought it was fixed but then it started refusing inputs at a certain point. And I, myself, wasn't feeling well and I'd gotten this spiffy laptop and just ignored the computer for months. So, with the new goal of getting at a couple of recipes and my party planning lists, I just cut bait, figured out what was jamming the inputs, pressed F8, and removed that (unnecessary) program entirely. It's fine now.

This is a very funny thread. Plllog I LOVE your writing ability!!! '
You've always been an integral part of the group, very knowledgeable on so many things. I've missed you in recent months.

Scary! Don't get caught outside the pod bay doors with that computer in charge!

LOL!! Don't worry, John, it's merely cranky, not sentient or psychotically self-aggrandizing. :)

Jasdip, thank-you! It's a sign that I'm feeling better that the funny is coming back. :) I've been told my meeting minutes are very funny, when I thought I was just recording. :) I've actually been around here most days but I probably come on after you so you miss my posts. I'm glad to see you posting more, too. You always bring a sunny touch. :)

Here is another approach:

I use a two-slot docking station ($27 from Amazon). The docking station can be connected to you PC using USB connector.

Plug in a spare hard drive and you can back up your files as you are creating them. At some point, you can get another hard drive that has the same GB capacity as your hard drive in your PC, unplug your PC's hard drive and plug in the docking station with another hard drive, you can make an identical cloned hard drive as the one in your PC.

So if your PC hard drive dies, just put in the cloned drive, and you will have all the files plus all the software just as before the crash. A couple of minutes and you are back in business.

Otherwise, having all you files but no software doesn't do you a lot of good. Loading software is a real pain and sometimes not possible.

dcarch

Thank goodness I haven't had a hard drive die! That sounds complicated. It was the software that glitsched. I still would have had to fix it to get the latest data.