A Tough Week

On Sunday, October 26, after Liz and I went to St. Mary's for the first time in many weeks, we drove back to Heart Lake for what was intended to be our last regular trip of the season. After conversation on Monday with our contractor, we have determined that we will make another trip (either a day trip or overnight) within the next couple of weeks.

Monday night it started to snow. We were planning to close up Tuesday anyway, and return by way of Binghamton, but weather conditions in the morning determined us to skip the Binghamton part. I drained the water and we loaded the car and were on the road before 11:30 am. The trip took eight hours (normally it takes around three hours.) I went almost direct from the car to a board meeting which lasted until 11:00 pm.

On Wednesday my computer died. Since I use a high powered laptop instead of a desktop, there are complicated issues around repair and recovery. I don't have a current backup of my data -- my backups are at least four months out of date.

Right now I am using Liz's laptop, so for current things I am ok, but I did an awful lot of data entry over the summer -- mostly family history and other genealogy data. I don't want to have to redo all of that. Also my Quicken files -- although I could reconstruct them from paper records I certainly don't want to. There are pictures, however, for which there is no backup or way to recover them except from the hard drive.

I think my problem is that Windows is corrupted, but I am not geeky enough to be able to tell. I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for data recovery if I can do it myself, but I also don't want to risk losing my data. So I am actively researching theissue before I do anything. More later.