That Was The Week That Was

 As soon as I loaded the software, I noticed some unusual things happening. Files that I use all the time were not there. The longer I looked, the worse it got. Finally Windows itself went away. Now this was in a shrink wrapped package and it had not been tampered with.

 I had to go back to square one. The disk was reformatted and all software had to be uploaded. Fortunately, I keep all original copies of the software but it was still a tremendous amount of work. I worked about 12 straight hours and finally decided to call it a night and went to bed.

 But I couldn't sleep. So I got up and worked straight through the night. I finally got most of the software installed and then started to rebuild the files from my backup tape. Much to my chagrin, the backup tape was two months old. I had lost a lot of data. The biggest hurt here was the loss of future articles for this Newsletter. Fortunately, I had backed up a lot of them on floppy disks, but I still did lose a number. If any of our contributing authors are reading this, consider it as a gigantic hint. 

The first thing I restored was my E-mail. I was able to recover all my E-mail by copying the individual notes to a file. I had previously downloaded them, so my offline mail reader couldn't download them again. That was a chore.

 As I am writing this, I still have a few things to recover, but for the most part am done. Another day or two and I should be back in business. Notice I changed the article this week to one by Kevin Needham who discusses this very issue. Loss of your programs and data is a very serious concern which most of us don't pay enough attention to. Believe me, I will back up my data at least once a week from now on.