Adding to woes

So another week after Comic-Con, the week after my backpack was stolen from my car by someone who smashed the window, I decide to treat myself by installing solid state drives on my main computer.

Great idea, poor execution.

Somehow, I ended up without a decent clone of my disks and, when I tried to go back to my original installation, windows decided it wouldn’t recognize the pair of disks that formed my D: drive — naturally enough, the drive with my home directory and all.

The end result is that I found myself with about 2 files in every 3 corrupted and useless.

The good news is (with few exceptions) that I keep my working files backed up. That is: novels, novellae, novelettes, short stories, plots, et cetera. The bad news is that I don’t back up my art, my business folders, my (sigh) QuickBooks Pro files — so all that’s lost.

On the other hand, I think that Windows is probably correct in suspecting one of my hard drives, particularly given that I couldn’t fully restore them, and so I’ve come to the conclusion that a computer system should be replaced about every three years. I’ve also come to the conclusion that I really, really need to be religious about backing up everything on a regular schedule.

(In my defense, the pair of drives that formed a Striped RAID were supposed to be 3 drives forming a RAID 5 — Striped and Mirrored — configuration only the 3rd drive was bad out of the box and I couldn’t at the time afford a replacement.)

If you ever do have similar problems, I recommend Ease US Data Recovery Wizard — it’s free and seems to do a good job.