Oh that fun computer!

A series of blunders


A few weeks ago I succeeded in deleting an important folder from my desktop. I don't know how it happened, only that it did. Could not find the folder in the recycle bin or anywhere on the computer.  Wasn't worried at first because I have an external hard drive backup system. Should be no problem restoring the missing folder. Right?

And now I'm ashamed to admit that in the four or so years I've had this backup I never learned how to use it. I didn't have a reason. So it was a complete mystery to me.

It took me three days to find the folder. Just getting into the external drive was hard enough. Then, I could not find my folder, or anything else in fact, because the stupid thing only backed up my C drive. Programs and settings. The D drive, all my data, was not getting backed up. For a whole year!

Last year, on February 2, 2017, a computer geek brought me a new computer and used the external backup to transfer everything from my old computer. I paid no attention to how it was done and only knew that it did the trick. Everything was transferred, and the geek set up the external hard drive to backup my new computer. [So it was his fault, right?]

Thankfully, my old computer data until February 2, 2017 was still on the external backup drive,  And there was my missing folder [minus, of course, anything I added and 2017].  Just as I was ready to grab that folder the lights on the external drive began flashing like crazy.  Then the flashing stopped. And it seemed the drive no longer existed, no longer showing on the computer.

Before I could get through cussing, the power suddenly went out, the house, the neighborhood, were totally dark. Great. Just what I needed!

I read by candlelight for about an hour, and then like magic the lights came back on. And the external drive was back, lights and all, intact. That missing folder is now on my desktop again!

I downloaded a recommended recovery program to search for any 2017 files from the folder, but because I didn't know that I should not have used my computer until I recovered the files, they were overwritten and unrecoverable.

Learn something new every day.

I decided I had better figure out how to setup the external drive to back up all my data.  More bad news. Clickfree, the maker of the external drive, was no longer in business. I could find no information, no help, no support, only a bunch of dissatisfied customers.

Doing some research on which external hard drive/backup is easy to use and comes with support.

So there went 3 to 4 to 5 days of aggravation and worry. And then the other shoe dropped.

A day or two later my speech recognition program suddenly stopped working. Not a problem, I thought. This happened before. Uninstall the program. Reinstall from a disk. It took about 45 minutes, and everything was humming, then a message popped up that setup failed due to corrupt registry keys or drivers.

I may try to fix it myself, or I may just hire a tech expert to do it for me. In the meantime, I'm using windows speech recognition, which works OK, but is not really user friendly. And because I'm still running on windows 7, it's about eight years old and needs an update badly. Which will never happen.

I'll need to throw in the towel and get windows 10.
But not before making sure everything is backed up!

--Cat