Major Cautionary Tale and Important Notice
Published: Sun, 09/25/16
Here I was, bright eyed and bushy-tailed at around 8 AM on a Sunday morning. I was optimistic, now that I was feeling better, that today would be a highly productive day.
And then I wandered into my living room where my PC is set up and saw a blue screen.
Uh oh.
That's okay...restart, brush my teeth, have some coffee. Blue screen again. Oh no. Wake the tech savvy son. Stay calm.
I do have a backup hard drive after all. But had I used it at all in 2016? Nope. June of 2015 was the last time I'd dragged anything over there.
You get busy, you know...you'll do it later.
Son has an idea to take my hard drive and access it through his computer, since my PC won't boot. All files? Gone. Each folder he opened...Empty. Empty. Empty.
For some reason I still wasn't panicking. After all, my PLR is up online. Blog posts, etc. I have Roboform, so all my passwords should be safe.
I took the hard drive to Frys to see if it can be salvaged, and my new hard drive is installed - and so, so bare it makes me feel like it's 1997 all over again and I'm just starting out online.
I got my Windows installed, my PPT, Word and Excel. But all sorts of other things are missing. All of my exclusive bonuses I created - gone. They're inside JVZoo, so buyers can access them but I can't. Unless I buy my product lol.
I can't find my Secret Access Key to get into my Amazon S3 account where my launches are stored. When I got the notice from Amazon that we had to keep a record of our secret keys because they would no longer be allowing access, I dutifully copied mine down...in a txt file...on my hard drive.
I lost all of my fiction files. Every one gone. All that work. The series I'd published and the one I had almost completed. The covers...gone.
I'll have to go into my Hostgator and download over 900 PLR files.
The challenge I'm in the middle of? I have to recreate a PowerPoint file.
What did I do RIGHT in all of this?
#1 - I stayed calm. Oddly calm. Not a tear was shed. I spent all day relaxed. Disappointed, but what good would it have done to freak out? I wonder if it was reading that Mindful PLR for a review yesterday? LOL!
#2 - I had luckily printed out everything I was working on currently. My challenge days were printed out, so I know what to teach each day. My upcoming PLR launch outline is printed. I did lose the first 3 reports I had created, but I'll redo them. I had also printed out the outline of my next fiction book - the one I was almost finished with - so at least I have that much.
#3 - I had installed Roboform on my laptop, so even though my new hard drive wouldn't let it work with old login info for some reason, my laptop did - so I hand copied 589 URLs and passwords into a spiral notebook today.
Today, I'm a cautionary tale. Other days I'll be an inspiration. It balances itself out.
One thing I can tell you is this...
First, please bear with me as I recover from this fiasco. I will be slower. I may have to find a way to find files. And I may be behind a day or three in replying to things.
Second, don't just back up stuff to one place. Have a variety of methods - including print!
I'm so glad I had most of my bookmarks but for some reason it's slightly old, so I'm missing everything from the past 3 weeks or so. Oh well.
Clean slate!
I hope y'all had a much better Sunday than I did. I'm just happy my kids are home and so supportive and precious. And Mom's doing carpool tomorrow afternoon so I can put it in overdrive with repairing this mess.
Tiff ;)
P.S. Prefer a weekly digest?
http://www.tiffanylambert.com/weeklytiff.html