Lost ComputerS!

Yes that's right. I didn't just loose one, but I lost both of my computers to two seperate incidents. Oh I thought I was going to die. This has been torture. About three weeks ago my main computer froze up. Done! Dead! Gone! I wanted to scream.

My main computer was exactly that, my main files, photos everything! Everything I do to make money and maintain our life revolves around this computer. My Heritage Makers stuff, blogging, photos, genealogy research (not only my families history which took two years to find, but two other families I'm working on), my checking account, menus, calendars, and so much more. Almost all of it is gone.

The old photos of ancestors are fine. Most of them I had backed up by putting them on my Heritage Makers account, but photos from the last couple months are gone. Then all of my fliers, brochures, labels and anything else I designed up myself for Heritage Makers are all gone! Genealogy was a stroke of luck. I had created a CD with a gedcom file of my family and the two other families I was working on to take with me to the Genealogy conference in March. So I have that stuff backed up, but I've still lost some of the other things like files of research that cousins sent me electronically. I'm not even sure of everything I lost of our families because I had so much!

I even lost programs that I bought and downloaded, but can't find the code anymore. Now I've got to buy them again. This time I'm not downloading the programs. I will be buying packages with the CD so I don't have this happen again.

This has been a big painful learning experience. You should always back things up! So now I have an external drive and I'll reformat an old hard drive to back everything up on a weekly basis. I can't afford this again. I am still trying to recover things, and somethings I may never recover. I know many of my databases I will just have to recreate.

Then to make maters worse. Easter weekend I had my laptop sitting on the desk, my daughter in my lap and a cup of coffee by my laptop. I wasn't paying attention and we were playing for a bit. My daughter leaned back and her head hit my laptop. There went computer number two. That weekend I was with out either computer. I thought I was going to really die then. I was on the phone with someone later and I was laughing about it. They couldn't believe I was laughing about it, but what can you do, if I didn't laugh I was certainly going to cry. Especially since the last incident was a stupid mistake on my part. So I spent the weekend in the basement helping hubby with my office. But I kept wondering what was going on with people I had freebie site business with online. If they thought I had just skipped out on them.

It's amazing the things we can do now because of computers. But it's also amazing how quickly it can all fall apart when computers are lost.

So fellow bloggers and genealogist, if you don't hear from me for just a bit longer, bare with me. I'm still trying to recover from this loss. I now can get back online and blog again, but recovering data, reentering data, reinstalling software, and everything involved with reinstating my computer is very time consuming. But when I get this behind me I will be back and running again.