One last word about the data loss thing from last night. (Well, at least until I put out the September and October email results.)
Losing 2000 emails of current vintage that I hadn’t yet “dealt with” including personal stuff, some business stuff (house stuff and the like) and a lot of messages I use for task management and the like threw me into a major psychological tailspin from which I am just starting to recover. But there is an important thing to remember. When it comes to obsessive compulsive things like saving every email I have sent or recieved since 1993 (including spam) I am just a tad… I say a tad… neurotic. And I know this. I know that the level to which I get upset is a bit beyond where it should be on a rational basis. I am working on that. I am getting better at these things. I am trying to keep a positive attitude and move forward without forever dwelling on the couple minutes where I could have prevented it. Having said that though, I know I still overreact.
And, as part of that, I want to publicly apologize to Chris.
Although I was actually trying to be “good” when talking (OK, IMing) with him about the difficulties last night, it has been pointed out to me that I did not actually succeed and ended up being very insensitive. Given my mental state at the time, I guess that is no surprise. I was so wrapped up in my own little neurotic disaster to properly acknoledge the great lengths Chris had gone to, with many many hours without sleep, to try to salvage the situation. And to the fact that while I lost a bunch of stuff, with perhaps a few exceptions, if I wasn’t quite as psycho about my mail, very little of it was truly “important” to anybody but me. (Although it WAS very important to me.) Meanwhile, both Rebecca and Chris lost lots of data as well. And much of Chris’s was work related. And, as with mine, there most often was not a way to recover it.
I’m sorry Chris. I *do* realize the amount of work you did, having done that kind of emergency repair work a few times on my own when drives have failed. I realize how stressful it is, and how heartbreaking it is to even be in that situation, and to know there is a lot you will not be able to get back. And I recognize that you have both lost a lot of value as well.
Last night when we IMed I was too wrapped up in my own loss to be sensitive to the work you had done, or your own loss. Most of my anger and frustration was actually directed at myself for having let my own routine backup strategy lapse. Once upon a time I had automatic daily backups of everything that mattered. I let that slip away. I also up until the very last second if I had been thinking could have just made a local backup “just in case”. I did not. And that is my fault, not yours. And regardless of that, I should have been commiserating in our mutual loss and thanking you for your hard work, rather than just being snippy.
I humbly apologize.
I can’t help you with the mortgage or task management stuff, but I did just forward you about 500+ messages that should keep you busy for a while. It’s not complete, I know, but hopefully you won’t have too many holes.
Woah. Cool. Thank you!
That should probably cover most of the messages from the CMU croud I imagine. And I have Brandy’s fairly complete set too.
That is a bunch. It will be the folks who tend to correspond to me completely seperately who lose out on the contest counts.
And of course the non-personal emails. Mailing lists and receipts from Amazon and notes from my mortgage and insurance companies and that sort of thing. But most of those I will be able to get by without.
And hey, for the task stuff, if I can’t remember it, it couldn’t have been that important anyway, right? :-)
Anyway, thanks for all the emails.
You’re the best Beki. :-)
Now I just have to figure out how I’ll track all these emails I’m getting back… :-)
Hey, I understand your loss, and that you were in a bad place mentally lastnight. I didn’t take it personally :) I was also at my wits end with the problem.
Losing over 5 years of email and all local documentation for thigns I manage, not to mention work and other related documentation is a sucky, sucky thing. The new drive(s) are raid-1 configured so they mirror themselves automatically.
I anticipate both of us will be making sure (looks like you already have) that all our important stuff is automatically redundant! I may even start looking at offsite options in case we have more hurricanes! :-)
Backing up 60 Gig over the internet at 56K would probably suck though, so perhaps I’ll wait until I have broadband. :-)
But I’ll be doing a local backup to an external drive tonight.
I’d do RAID, but it won’t fit in my laptop. :-)
Anyway, thanks for understanding Chris. I didn’t understand the full magnatude of your loss until this morning. I knew you had lost a bunch of old email and some files, but didn’t realize it was as bad as it was.
I feel for you. :-( [Now. :-)]