If it ain't broke...

I have flash drives.

Lots of flash drives.

All over my house.

I even carry one on my key chain.

I took some advice from someone who spends way too much time looking after me, I decided that it just might be time to consolidate.

This caretaker happened to come across a great deal and bought me a big flash drive that would hold all of my work. I spent much time gathering said flash drives and getting many semesters worth of very hard work onto one flash drive. I was backed up and it felt good. I erased all the baby drives and sent some off to school with my children and had the rest laying around as decorations.

I carried the big daddy drive with me everywhere always carefully backing up and work I did- I learned the backup lesson after The Great Computer crash of '09.

Last Wednesday, in a computer lab at school, I inserted my handy dandy flash drive into the computer to save the work I had just completed, and something wasn't right. The computer threw up a mean red flag and told me that the drive wasn't inserted. My eyes certainly disagreed as I could see the flash drive protruding from the massive black tower, but again the computer said that it wasn't there. I passed it off as a quirky computer thing, ejected the flash drive, and went off to my next class.

If you know me at all you know that I am The Great Procrastinator and it will come to no surprise that I ended up doing a great amount of work last minute this Sunday. Part of this work is a notebook project that involves busy work and wasted paper. I wasn't in the mood to waste my ink (couldn't anyway, don't have any) or my paper so I pulled out the big daddy handy dandy flash drive, hooked it up to my computer, and my precious laptop informs me that there is no drive inserted. Then it prompts me to format the drive. Then it tells me that it not able to be formatted.

And It Will Not Open!

Six semesters worth of work (minus that which was lost in the crash) IS GONE!!

For sure if it's there I don't know how to retrieve it.

And my heart dropped into my stomach.

This is not good.

This may not be fixable.

I might have lost so much inspired work on the whimsy of a flash drive.

I backed-up! I did what I was supposed to!

The stupid flash drive did not hold up it's end of the bargain.

So now I'm sitting here, hurt once again by a computer. I just about feel violated. Mainly I feel really bad and very upset about my work just disappearing.

But I have learned a new lesson. Backing up isn't good enough. You need to back up your back up and in several different places. And I'm sure that once I start getting the hang of that, something else will change, I'll lose even more work, and will have yet another hard computer lesson to learn.