What a crazy day!
This morning, I had to go into the office, but before I left, I did a little bit of work on my computer. Just as I was finishing up, a little pop-up appeared telling me it was time to empty the trash. Being the obedient wee soul that I am (yeah, right), I emptied the trash. At the same time, I checked my clock and realised that I was cutting it rather fine to get to the office.
So, I shut the laptop down. Well, I shut the lid down, threw it in my bag and off I went.
Arriving at the office, I opened up the lid, and there on my my desktop was NOTHING!
Let me explain. I have one folder on the desktop, and everything is in that folder. Think me weird? Well it’s simply to reduce the clutter on the desktop and away from prying eyes.
BUT it was gone!
My heart sank, and I thought, ‘nooooo, it’s got to be here. It just has to be.’ But I sure couldn’t find it. And the only thing I could think of was that it had somehow got into the trash bin, and so was deleted.
Now I have an Apple. We’ve got a little search thing. The first thing I did was put in the name of the folder. Nothing came up, so I searched the names of folders inside this folder. And it was a big fat zero.
It was like I had lost everything. I mean this was all my work was GONE.
First thing was ‘don’t panic, Fee, we can work this out’. ‘Take a breath and get into a calm state so you can think logically.’
I then remembered that I had my Time Machine backup at home. This is a hard drive that I use to back up my computer, but I also back up on iCloud.
The first thing to do – go on to iCloud. And, damn, if that wasn’t empty as well.
Obviously, from the time I left home to the time I got to the office and opened the lid, it had done a new backup.
I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got a Time Machine backup, thankfully.’ I do backups regularly, and I knew there wasn’t a great deal of new stuff since the last time I plugged in the Time Machine, so there was no point in getting worried. It would be okay.
I made my apologies and left work, as I couldn’t do any work anyway. When I got home, I plugged in the backup, opened it up, and… it wasn’t there!!!
It was now getting close to panic mode. I hadn’t been into my Time Machine to recover files for years, so I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right.
Now, I am fortunate that one of our clients does computer stuff. So I called him and said, “Help. I need you.”
Off I went with my laptop and Time Machine to see him. It took all of a minute for him to open the Time Machine correctly, and there was my desktop exactly as it should be.
Whew!
That’s right – back up your computer using an external hard drive because if you lose shit, you’re screwed.
The other thing was I tried to stay calm to logically figure out what went wrong and how I could fix it.
All’s well. I’ve got all my stuff, and life moved on.
Gosh. Don’t want to do that again. That was scary.
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