Seriously guys- this is a PSA.
I installed Office 365 last night, and there was some error in the installation. I had to reset my computer, and suddenly my "My Documents" folder was gone. TOTALLY GONE. not dis-associated, it totally tore the files out of the hard drive and crashed the whole folder. I reinstated the My Documents folder and it stopped coming up with errors, but the files were all gone.
Anyways, System Restore doesn't back up files- just system folders. This is something I didn't realise till I looked, and what I was backing up was my art only. I scoured all my old hard drives, thumb drives, everything to find a copy of all my old stories dating back till I was a young teenager. They're crap stories, but I still want them to read my old ideas.I couldn't find any of them. I thought I had backed up my old stories- turns out I took that for granted. They were all gone. I checked the Cloud system Office uses hoping it uploaded my documents to the cloud without my permission- nothing. I checked the recycling bin. Nothing.
Now, I need to chat with Office still incase they need to update the program. Maybe they can still recover my files, but I was SUPER lucky that my old obselete hard drives for my old computer is still in my possession, and work has an old IDE compatible PC I could hook them up to, cause one of them had an old version of the files (which is fine cause any new stories are uploaded to the net), but I may not have been so lucky.
Please- Take some time out of your day today and back up all your files you care about on at least one separate source. You don't want to go through what I went through this last 12 hours. I'm only just starting to recover from the shock hours after finding the files safe.
And please- feel free to share stories about losing or refinding files / errors that your computer couldn't easily recover from or what ever. We all need the wake up call- technology isn't forever, and keeping several back ups is a really good idea for longevity, and it doesn't take long :)
:pd:
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