And, in other news....BACK UP YOUR FILES

Grr. So a few days ago I picked up a virus from somewhere. Not really sure where...my list of sites I go to is pretty narrow.

Anyway, it did some pretty fun stuff on my fine computer. Like, to stop programs I had to unplug the computer.

I could get it going in 'safe" mode, but it would not even start otherwise. It would lock up during the booting process and get stuck forever.

This made me sad.

Over the years, I had downloaded a few programs like Picasa and Itunes that had, in turn, a great deal of time-consuming downloads of their own.

Like all my cds so I could just keep rotating the music on my Ipod instead of changing out cds.

And thousands upon thousands of photographs...family trip to Silver Falls, the trip to see the graduation, family Christmases, including a few pics of my late Uncle Ken.

Other files, of course, though less important.

Manuscripts for both the Trilogy, the steel story, and the man who couldn't die.

Resumes.

Open Office files for some things my brothers and I do.

And the only way I could figure out to get it fixed was the option of reformatting the computer.

Which wipes out EVERY download.

So now, I have in front of me the intimidating task of re-downloading hundreds of cds, data card after data card of photos...

On the bright side, I once more have a fully functioning machine.

On the dark side, I did not have one for a few days and lost a lot of data.

Fortunately, all the truly important data was backed up in one way or another.

Good thing.

I will probably not ever forget losing a couple hundred pages I had written on the Trilogy which never could be recovered.

But boy is it frustrating meantime.