Guest Post: Unsettled but Happy Part 3

Click on this link and read on for a guest post I wrote for a wonderful blog that offers expat advice for moving, weathering the transition, and helping your kids. The blog is called Your Expat Child and here is part 3:

An Unsettled but Very Happy Thrid Culture Kid 

Guest Post: Unsettled but Happy Part 2

Click on this link and read on for a guest post I wrote for a wonderful blog that offers expat advice for moving, weathering the transition, and helping your kids. The blog is called Your Expat Child and here is part 2:

An Unsettled but Happy Third Culture Kid 

Guest Post: Unsettled but Happy

Click on this link and read on for a guest post I wrote for a wonderful blog that offers expat advice for moving, weathering the transition, and helping your kids. The blog is called Your Expat Child and here it is:

An Unsettled but Very Happy Third Culture Kid Part 1

Expats Blog Interview and Competition

Drawing with light in Xining.

For those American readers that I have, I hope you will join me a very sincere sigh of relief that campaign season is OVER (for now). All of those endless ads, the complete standstill of government, and the ridiculous assertions from media sources on both sides will hopefully diminish for quite some time. Elated or disappointed, be proud that there was such a large voter turn out and that we have the freedom to express our views. 

In an effort to move past the unresolved nightmare that is my fickle faulty hard drive, I submitted a piece to a writing competition for Expats Blog. 

It is entitled "The Perils of Shopping" and I would really appreciate it if you took the time to read my submission and spread it wide! 

Click "like" and share it because exposure is one of the factors that the judges will take into consideration. The others are of course content as well as creativity. Please also leave comments and feedback. The contest ends Saturday the 10th of November, so there is a tight time limit on this. 

You can also click here to go to the main contest page in order to vote for me. Just scroll down to the Perils of Shopping and click "like"!

Thank you very much! Also, I was interviewed and you can read it here. I discuss my current move, my upbringing, and what it means to be a TCK. If you were ever curious about me, this is an in-depth interview. 

Again, please "like" and share my contest submission and don't forget to leave a comment at the bottom! I only have until Saturday, so let's make as much noise as possible!

For the Love of All that is Good, Backup!

My recalcitrant laptop.

My ailing hard drive...

*If you choose not to read the whole of my saga, take away this: BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER. This goes double/triple for those who are on the move. Your computer is being jostled about and exposed to different temperatures and climates.This faithful recorder of your amazing adventures will only last so long and its time at your side is finite. Keep its legacy alive and backup (on multiple devices) often.*  

A week and a half ago, the unthinkable happened. My computer crashed. I know that in the scheme of life and all the misery that exists in the world that this is relatively small. I am healthy, I have food, shelter, clothing, and access to clean water. A disaster has not struck (I hope those who are recovering from Hurricane Sandy have all the help that they need. My thoughts are with you). Life could be a lot worse. However, these rational reassurances do not make this situation any better. It still feels like a combination of a sucker punch to the stomach and life spitting on you in disgust. 

When it happened, I thought it was a minor problem. Just my computer acting up and requiring a hard restart. I only began to catch on to the issue when the laptop refused to boot. It just stopped. Such a small thing to occupy your time with but trust me, your world will narrow to the size of a screen when your machine refuses to work as it should. This particular catastrophe happened on a Saturday night. This cut short a lot of options for fixing the situation and I settled for eating a ton of chocolate and watching the Day After Tomorrow. The next day I ran around town looking for a SATA to USB cable (to connect the internal hard drive to another computer) and a new external hard drive to back up what I could salvage. 

Cost stopped me from buying an external hard drive sooner. I actually have a 300 gigabyte external back up, but pictures take up a lot of room and I had pretty much filled up my 500 gigabyte hard drive by the time this event happened. I had faithfully backed up in July but since a full backup couldn't be completed, I hadn't bothered to do it since. HUGE mistake. In the months since my partial, I had gone all around Alanya, traveled to Japan, and celebrated an anniversary in Cappadocia. I have organized countless folders and written a ton of lessons and articles. I set up a watermark that I was finally happy with. I also didn't know what was backed up on the external that I used in July. Were they all system files, music, some photos, some work? I had no way of knowing until I got my computer back online. The thought of losing everything was just disheartening. All of my photographs, all of my work, everything that I have worked toward and spent hours upon hours on, gone in a second.

I kept waiting to buy a terabyte backup drive and I just kept telling myself to wait another month and save up more money. Do not repeat my mistakes. Spend the money and make sure you have a backup that holds enough room for what you need. Even if you can only do a partial backup on what you have, DO IT. Spend the money and save yourself money later. You are going to have to do it eventually and putting it off will just result in a worse situation. After this happened, I ended up buying the terabyte that I had needed for months and I did not save myself a penny.

After getting the cable, I hurried home and plugged my faulty internal drive into the Boy's working computer. I hoped that I could just retrieve the files and this inconvenience would be at an end. It turns out nothing is ever as simple as you hope it will be. The hard drive couldn't be used unless it was formatted. Formatting erases everything. At this point we googled some recovery programs and sprang for Mini-Tools Data Recovery. It recovers 1 gig (a laughably small number for me) for free and then you have to pay $65. They have a return policy of a month and they claim to be able to restore data from damaged hard drives, which it was clear mine was. 

I set to scanning and the estimated time was 400 hours. I emailed the company and by the time they responded saying that this was not normal and that I should bring it to a specialized recovery company, the remaining time had decreased and the progress bar had moved. I decided to let it continue scanning. It started finding files. Hundreds of thousands of files. I can't even begin to explain to you the relief that I felt. Since it was clearly going to take days, I ended up buying a new internal hard drive. This ended up being an adventure in itself because I had no backup Windows 7 operating system. We downloaded it and burned it on a disk only to find out that the computer wasn't reading the disk and wouldn't launch the installation. We then reformatted the internal hard drive, just in case that would fix the problem. The next morning we tried again, to no avail. We then tried to put the Windows operating system on a USB thumb drive. This ended up working, however the installation stalled and claimed to be unable to find a partition to install the information in. It was lying because it clearly identified 500 gigs of available space, it just refused to acknowledge it. 

Through the industrious labor of the Boy, we figured out that maybe we had reformatted the disk to an incorrect format. So then we spent another handful of hours rectifying this issue. Success! One thing went right and I finally had a working laptop after four days. 

Quick note, the Mini-Tools Recovery Program is very thorough and it will identify every single drive connected to the computer it is run on. We had forgotten to unplug the only backup I had and once the program started it refused to allow us to remove any of the drives that were connected. So while I had a working computer I still had no idea what I had left from the wreckage of my capricious machine.

Finally, on day five of the recovery process, the recovery bar was at 90% and it had found over 300,000 files. I figured that I was in the homestretch. I will be completely honest: Nothing is worse than having your hope crushed, the life drained out of the bright light that you had been clinging to. Defeat is disappointing, failure is crushing, but holding onto a tenuous thread of hope that keeps getting thinner and thinner trumps them all. When I checked the Boy's laptop the next day, the screen flashed white and then black. His video card had stopped working. After waiting and crying (me), we hard restarted his computer.  

I took this as an opportunity to disengage the secondary that contained the iffy backup. When we reopened the program, I saw the worst thing that you can see at this stage: 0%. Disappointment, failure, and the smashed up remains of my hope were all that greeted me. 

Then even worse, the progress bar moved and sped through the initial scan. Hope flickered temporarily back to life. It grew stronger and stronger as I saw the remaining time at a mere 75 hours. Maybe because of the prior scanning, this would go faster! While attempting to cling to this delusion, I took this opportunity to check what I did have. 

It was more than I was expecting. I have all of my photos up until time of the backup. I have all of my writing. I have some of my music. It could have been worse. 

By the time I had checked everything, the recovery program was up to an admirable 10%. Unfortunately it hadn't found a single file. Not one. All of the numbers next to all the various file types that are possible have stayed stubbornly at 0. We are now around 50% and still nada. I have no idea where those 300,000 files went. Did they disapparate (Harry Potter reference) in a flash of white and black? My hope, which had expanded so gloriously, is being smothered into submission once more. The sad thing is that I still hold a guttering belief that this might still turn out. I just wish I knew. If I need to cope, then I want to be able to accept the loss of my work. If I need to rejoice, then I need to know to break out the wine and then back up everything over and over again. I just need to know.  

For those who have been following my Facebook page, thank you for bearing with my slew of computer updates. I realize they are not as thrilling as faraway travel or as thoughtful as musings on identity, but this is something everyone can experience. So learn from me and for the love of all that is good and bright in the world, backup. 

I will post one last comment on this when I know if the tears are gushing or if the wine will be flowing.