Story time.  So the other day, my computer crashed and then it wouldn’t restart.  I’m not much of a hardware person, but my brothers are, so I spent a long phone call with one of them opening it up and inspecting the hard drives.  The hard drives are fine.  Great.  It’s probably a software issue, and the Windows installation was corrupted.

Anyways, I decide it would be easier to bring it into a shop rather than fixing it myself.  I put it in a suitcase and roll it over to the repair shop across the street.  I tell them Windows needs to be reinstalled, and they say they’ll take it in for advanced diagnostics.  It’s free, provided that I register as a member–so actually it’s not free, it’s $60.

A few days later and they say it’s fixed.  Not diagnosed, fixed.  They say that they needed to reinstall Windows, which is what I had said.  So I roll the computer back to my apartment, and guess what?  The computer works, but the hard drive is wiped.  Specifically, just one of the two hard drives was wiped, the other hard drive is fine.  It’s just… that was the hard drive I was using.

My brothers tell me that it was astoundingly incompetent for them to do that, practically a scam.  They say I should charge back the repair fee.  I say that there was no repair fee, technically it was free.  So the rationale for the cost structure is revealed!

But look at me, I’m not mad.  If you know me, you know I don’t get mad.  I immediately moved on to acceptance.  But regardless of how I feel… I decided it was appropriate to create a Yelp account so I could give them a 1 star review.

Did I lose anything important?  I thought about it, and I guess I lost my photo organization.  Not the photos themselves, just the photo organization.  So, I can’t tell which origami photos have been posted on my blog or not.  Well, that’s not too bad.  I lost a few files associated with my game–really just the marketing assets, which hadn’t been in the game’s git repository.  And… I lost most of the vector graphics files for my origami diagrams, so now I just have the pngs that I posted to Flickr.

Now I do have a backup hard drive.  But every time I use it, I find the hard drive’s dashboard so comically bad that I feel discouraged from using it on a regular basis.  As a result, none of the backups are recent enough that they would include any of the important stuff mentioned above.  Also, I’m not kidding about the dashboard being bad… it’s actually so bad that so far I have not been able to recover any of the backups.  The backup hard drive… it has one job!