Blue Screen of Death

That was the diagnosis when I took my computer to the IT department at UTC. It booted fine on Tuesday, I closed it to put it to sleep, and the next time I opened it I got some error message on a black screen. The guys in IT are great. They assured me that they will most likely be able to recover the documents on my hard drive. They helped me finally get my work email coming in on my phone, which I've needed. I felt ok, until today.

I got an email from our administrative assistant that, "The hard drive crashed and there is no way to recover any of [my] files. But the good news is it's under warranty and [they've] ordered [me] a new one." Are you kidding me? I don't give a crap if it's under warranty, MY FILES ARE GONE!!! It doesn't come out of my pocket if they have to buy a new hard drive!

I feel like such an idiot. There is an external hard drive sitting on my desk that I haven't backed up to in 2 months or more. We are never in the office, and when we are, I'm not thinking about backing up my computer. I usually have other things to do. Yes, I did lose work files, but hopefully that won't affect me too much.

There is one thing that I've lost that I absolutely cannot replace. I started keeping a pregnancy journal when I found out I was pregnant. I was recording my journey, with dates and weeks of pregnancy, and writing letters to our baby. I was planning to make a bound book with pictures of my belly growing inserted into the journal, something that the baby could keep forever and read exactly what I was feeling while pregnant with him (or her). It's gone, all of it. I haven't backed up my files since before I got pregnant. I can try and recreate the "bones" of it, writing about milestones and such, but the sentiment can never be recreated. I will never get those words back and I'm so sad. I've looked forward to being pregnant my whole adult life and my diary to remember it by is gone. I don't even know if I want to try and start over now. If I do, from now on may be wonderful, but I'm afraid the beginning will sound textbook and cold.

Well, lesson learned. I will probably obsessively back up my hard drive for the rest of my life. But for now, it's too late and I choose to wallow in self-pity.