I tell ya, I just want to scream, the last couple of days have driven me crazy and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.
A few weeks ago I was dong some maintenance on my Apple computer in order to free up some disk space. I was down to only 23 GB of free space and my system was running slow and bogging down.
Being very careful (or at least I thought), I delete a bunch of files that freed up an additional 20 GBs of space, which still wasn't enough to make a difference, my computer continued to give me problems freezing up and not opening certain applications. There was still a large chunk of my hard drive that was being taken up by unwanted files that I didn't feel comfortable deleting myself, so I was going to live with it for a while until I could figure out when I could get someone to help me out.
Unfortunately, one of the after effects of my tinkering with my computer's hard drive was that I had been unable to download, save or burn pictures to a CD. Somehow my picture software became corrupted and became "Read Only"which made it virtually unusable and a big problem. My sons and my wife needed to download and burn pictures for their school work and other projects. I wasn't overly concerned about it thought because I knew they had some time and that I could take it over to an Apple store on my day off to have them correct the problem.
So that's what I did today and I kind of wish that I didn't.
The Geniuses at the Apple store worked on my computer for nearly 4 hours, in order to fix the problem with my iPhoto picture program they need to "rebuild" the computer hard drive.
They asked me if I had something with me to back up the current data on the hard drive onto and luckily I did, I had my portable hard drive with me. That was great they said, they could back up my system onto the portable unit then work on rebuilding the main hard drive on the computer. They warned me that some data could be lost but not to worry, that I should be able to retrieve most, if not all, from the portable device. As it turned out, that wasn't quite true.
I lost over a dozen applications that I had either downloaded from the internet or purchased and upgraded over the years, along with dozens and dozens of bookmarks that my family used on a daily basis for school, business or recreational use. It will take weeks to reestablish the many bookmarks, while some of the applications are lost forever or will cost me to reinstall with the updates.
So the moral of this story boys and girls, is to make sure you back up all your computer files and program properly and don't do any maintenance on your system yourself unless you know exactly what you are doing because chances are, even though you have a "genius" working on it to fix your problems, they may not be very smart either.
4 comments:
Remember that these apple geniuses don't need extensive training to work as a 'genius'. Reasonably you should have backups of all your stuff periodically. Always consider yourself as having one less copy of something than you actually do. If you have one copy, you have no copies. Also, it is kind of standard practice at most tech shops not to guarantee your data.
Gee Mike you could give my son Chris a call, he is a genius at this stuff, it's his major.
Thanks for the insights.
I do have my hard drive backed up on a portable device but being able to located and reinstall some of the programs has become difficult. I am slowly finding things to restore but others will need to redownload.
What was the most frustrating was that my passwords no longer worked and I couldn't reset them. I was able to find a work around however. So while I may not be a genius, I know enough to get around a few things, It's just a little frustrating.
Sounds like the Facebook IPO.
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