I can’t tell you how many conversations Kristen and I had about buying another external hard drive for the sole purpose of backing up all of the EMW media. It was just something we knew that we inevitably had to follow through on. For some reason it didn’t feel that urgent though. Even with 30+ comics (both the gigantic photoshop files and the scaled down web versions), our growing catalog was barely making a dent on my hard drive space.
Then one day I got the famous blue screen of death. I’ve never had one on any computer I’ve ever owned. I read up on it and figured out what I thought was the problem. My hard drive had two partitions. The one Ed was stored on was nearly empty. The other one was almost at capacity and I assumed the operating system was having trouble booting and running because of this. So I cleared EVERYTHING out. For a few days the machine was running better than it ever had. Then, just like that- kaput.
I lost a great deal of work other than our comics. Luckily I have a separate and much faster computer I use for video editing so our other projects were fine, but I’m still coming to terms with all of the stuff I’ll never be able to replace. It would have cost an insane amount of money to even try to fix it. So I still would have been billed even if they couldn’t find or repair the exact problem. It just didn’t make sense. So they offered me a refurbished machine and even gave me my old one back in case I wanted someone else to take a look at it and reaffirm their diagnosis.
*sigh*
I remember considering opening a gmail account just to send myself the photoshop files as backup until we got that external drive. It was just one of those things I perpetually kept telling myself I’d do tomorrow. All things considered, better that it happened so early on than after years and years worth of work. Thanks for your patience while we found our footing again. I had to rebuild our setup from scratch and although it devastated me to skip last week’s update, we really didn’t have a choice.
Lessons learned. But we’re back, the prelude’s winding down, and the next chapter is going to be insane. See you next week!
