LibraryTechtonics

Overall, 2006 was a roller coaster year. On the climb, I went to China, presented at a conference, taught continuing education classes, hit 3 ALA conferences as a blogger, began cooperative execution of a grant to promote databases with my boss (which has resulted in 3 presentations so far with more to come), got the ball rolling on resurrecting the Netguides program at my library, took on the PLA Blog on my own and collaborated on a bunch of nifty PLA projects, landed in a book (Michael Sauers is a rock star).

On the steep downhill, I didn’t blog nearly enough, watched The Long Queue grow hopelessly longer, and experienced much peril in my non-professional life (which I don’t talk about on this here professional blog on purpose, but suffice it to say it’s relatively under control now).

Also, I ended the year on a sour-but-somehow-appropriate note with the temporary death of my laptop, Benzaiten (named for the Japanese goddess of all that flows, including information, and, incidentally, my patron saint). In a moment of holiday panic and immersed in general family mayhem trying to burn a DVD slideshow for my father Christmas Eve, I made several errors of judgement, which led to the upgrading of a CDRW/DVDRW driver that killed my access to Windows XP. Despite all efforts to boot the machine in safe mode or to the last known good configuration, all efforts failed.

Needless to say, as my laptop *is* all that is good and holy in my little geek world, I was the saddest panda ever.

Long story long, after much researching of the problem online, asking friends and professionals, and calling support (which included the fun issues of owning an OEM version of Windows, learning that Toshiba tech support only really deals with hardware, and all sorts of other fun), and many geek man-hours between this husband and wife tech team, we took my beloved Benzi to Geek Squad at Best Buy for full-scale data backup to a brand new 160GB external hard drive (yeah, I had them back up the whole thing with room to spare — for now — for both home computers).

I spent some time this afternoon using the Auto Recovery DVD that came with my laptop to reimage my machine to the original factory settings (because, apparently, recovery really means “start over,” go fig), and installing antivirus software. That way, I can connect my lovely Benzi to the internet behind the home firewall, update the virus definitions, *then* connect to Windows Update to receive hours upon hours of updates. That’s before reinstalling all the software, importing my Windows profile data, and all sorts of other data fun.

Morals and upsides include:

• Zen is not a myth, and tends to kick in when it really can’t get much worse.
• Deep breaths do indeed help. A lot.
• The painful learning experience was very, very effective.
• To know better doesn’t always mean to do better, even for a techie.
• You can also learn from my pain. Hurray!

So, what’s the new plan?

• First things first: When I’m done setting up my baby this week, I’ll leave images already uploaded to Flickr and other space-consuming completed projects on the external drive. I’ll likely also burn the images, music, and other stuff to DVD, just to complete the “I’m been burned *hard*” paranoid persona, just this once.
• Weekly: Back up the My Docs folder to the external hard drive *and* to my nice new 2GB jump (which I purchased just before The Incident, but neglected to use. ::sigh::). I haven’t been doing that lately (I used to, honest), and I need to get back on that wagon with the new year. I’ll keep 2 weeks worth of backup in separate, dated folders, deleting the oldest of the two when creating a new one.
• Monthly: Complete backup of the entire laptop hard drive to the external hard drive (keeping 2 at a time, same as the weeklies). That way, it’s all exactly as I left it, just in case I need it. And, removal from the laptop hard drive of files I’m not actively using (uploaded photos, large completed projects, etc.), with the backups now living on the external drive and possibly on CD/DVD.
• Before software installs/driver updates: Manually set a Restore Point. In the mayhem of a small house full of loud, festive family, I didn’t do it (though I normally do), and it cost me in time, money, and severely diminished mental state. At least the Restore Point can help me get back to just *before* I made a mistake, if necessary.
• When working on major projects: Periodically backup entire project to my jump drive and/or to a CDRW/DVDRW, depending on how portable the backup needs to be. Time consuming? On occasion. Value of not losing tons of work? Priceless.

Don’t be a sad panda. Learn from my mistakes (holiday madness is really only a so-so excuse), and start the tech part of your new year right with regular backup schedule for your stuff. It doesn’t need to be as excessive and detailed as mine (even a weekly My Documents backup would be a keen start), and you don’t even need fancy software if you have Windows XP, since you can use the pre-fab little wizard to help you do it.

For now, Benzi is at least booting up like her regular self (no more blue screen stop errors, thank the stars), and I am breathing many sighs of relief. It’ll be at least a few days before she’s back to her regular all-things-that-flow self, though. At least I’ll get a lot of crocheting done watching her update and clicking OK a lot. All the same, happy new year to me, and to you, too. It can only get better.

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