Looking for the silver lining…

Today was one of those days I’d like to start all over again, but that’s just not possible. The morning started out ok until I rebooted my computer as I hadn’t done it the night before (my usual nightly ritual). That’s when the day came unstuck. My computer got into an eternal loop trying to start back up again and got stuck consistently at the same spot and kept trying again.

I’ve experienced similar before so decided to power down the computer and let it sit for awhile before starting it back up, but this time that didn’t work. When I did start it up again it asked me if I wanted to start in Safe Mode – now that usually works. But again, the eternal loop and then finally a prompt to press F10 System Recovery. Now, I thought it meant it would do what I’ve done before – a System Restore to an earlier time period, but no, this was different and next thing I knew it was reformatting my hard disk.

That was not my intention at all but to try and stop the process might cause even more problems so I let it go and consoled myself with the fact that I do regular backups of my data. Do you? It’s an important thing to think about and should be part of your disaster recovery plan for your business. I am amazed at the number of people I speak to who just do not back up their data at all – they’re a disaster waiting to happen.

Even with re-installing the software and putting the data back where it belongs it was an all day process for me. It’s the little fiddly bits, the tweaking to get Outlook looking the way it was again, getting the plugins and extensions for Firefox, re-adding usernames and passwords for email accounts and websites I manage – things that don’t seem to store with the backups.

So as I watched my computer go through the installations I grabbed the large pile of papers from my husband’s desk and sorted them for him, and placed them into folders so he can pass them to his accountant. And I thought to myself, that at least it’s the beginning of the month and I can make up for the lost time and $$. If it had been at the end of the month it would have been worse, with trying to make sure I’ve gotten maximum amount of work done and trying to get the invoicing done. I went through some other stuff that had been shoved aside in preference for work on the computer.

And as the day progressed I remembered that I was thinking about reformatting my hard disk sometime soon… I just wasn’t expecting the decision to be made for me! KMT

back up, system recovery, disaster recovery plan, virtual assistant, silver lining