Disaster!
As regular readers will know, I'm an apple (as in Mac) girl. I am in the very fortunate position (thanks to hard work!) of owning an iMac and an iBook. Well, the iMac was a work purchase and the iBook was a gift from my husband from those long-lost days of free-flowing cash. Both (the Mac equipment, not the husband!) are considered vintage by the company that created them. Hmmmm.
Today, I was innocently updating the iMac, not really paying attention to the software update whilst also on the phone. BIG mistake. Whatever was UPloaded has rendered my beautiful iMac incapable of even starting up again.
It is stuck in the limbo land. I texted my husband who texted his techno geek friend, who is our Mac guru. And the verdict? It could be terminal, according to my husband. I do not use these words lightly.
On that computer are all our photographs - from 2001 onwards, including our engagement and wedding. And every single photo that we have taken since we embraced digital photography. The dog. Our life in London. Our leaving our life in London. The housebuild. Our holidays. Our friends. Our diminished families. The emails we first sent to each other (yes, I did save them before!). The novels I started but never finished. Blah, blah, blah. Yes, we have backed up but not recently and it's on a separate drive that we cannot access because...it's linked to the iMac.
We also have apple care (one of those expensive insurance packages that has probably run out) but my husband thinks there is only one solution. A trip to the nearest apple store with both computers so that we can save what we can.
The implications of this innocent software update have not hit me yet but my husband assures me that THIS IS IT.
I just don't know what to say. Literally.
I had a similar experience with my PC two or three years ago. We lost a lot. A crumb of comfort - when we took the PC to our computer guru, she managed to retrieve most of our photos; that seemed to be the easiest aspect to sort out. The Word documents were gone. As were my son's cartoons he'd spent hours on. Of course on TV and films they seem to be able to get anything back! I really do know how you feel in this case but life does go on and a long time later I only experienced very mild feelings of panic when I read your post! It's upsetting to lose these things but it is only "stuff". Took me a while to take that on board so don't think I'm not extremely sympathetic. I just hope iMacs are easier to mend than PCs. Fingers crossed. Good luck with all the job situations too.
Posted by: goombagirl | July 01, 2008 at 08:08 AM
I'm sorry - that sounds very distressing and very stressful. Shows how much we rely on technology. Hope it's not driving you to eat rubbish (as it probably would me!).
love
Peridot x
Posted by: Peridot | July 01, 2008 at 05:21 PM
Oh no oh no oh no.....We lost all our photos once and were not backed up (very new to the whole thing so we didn't have too many. Since then we've been paranoid and very backed up. I hope you find some light at the end of the tunnel.
Good luck with jobs too.
Lesley x
Posted by: LesleyLesley | July 01, 2008 at 09:31 PM
I know why you haven't posted (assume the broken computers are still kaput) but hope you can get back to it soon!!
Stick to being good and you will v v happy.
Lesley x
Posted by: LesleyLesley | July 05, 2008 at 12:02 PM