2012, The new year

Well, it's been a long couple of days...

The way my computer's set up is- I've got a primary hard drive that's for operating system and programs, then I have a secondary hard drive that just for files, like photoshop files.

It's set up that way so that if anything happens to my computer, I'm only out the hour it takes to reinstall windows and the programs I use. No matter what happens, I still have that second hard drive with all the important stuff on it.

I'm not sure what happened, but yesterday, I lost it all.

Both hard drives. I have no idea how. There were suddenly about 30 windows error messages (at least a few were hard drive read errors), then an intense freeze up.

Then, I reinstalled windows. But everything on the second hard drive was gone. It wasn't even hooked up when reinstalling.

There isn't a single file left on the 500GB hard drive. Whatever happened, happened big.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around everything that was lost. That was the backup hard drive and EVERYTHING was on it.

I think the most pertinent thing that needs replaced (recreated) is a working file I used when I printed thumbnails on board.

Pretty much all the drawings I did up to this point are gone. The two most recent were drawings I did as christmas presents.

But, I've taken it in stride. I'm glad that Staci had backups on her computer of all her stuff I thought was safe on mine.

I'm thankful for the stuff I happened to have on my flash drives. (I have my text document of all my 15 character random key passwords- that would've been a nightmare to lose those)

And, it looks like it wasn't an actual hardware problem. The computer still works (and there's no way both hard drives went bad at exactly the same time anyway). And it's almost back to 100% (except the few hundred GB of files lost).

It happened on New Year's day, so I can appreciate the... I don't know... Symbolism. You know, out with the old, in with the new, ect.

I don't know, but I'm sure things could've been worse.

One discouraging thing though, is that I told Randall that mid-February was a pretty conservative estimate for the comic. I'm sure this is gonna push that back. Not as much as you might think though. Toning all these pages is, and probably always was, going to be a nightmare.

But all things considered, I'm looking up. And it's sort of funny. This was pretty much one of the worse case scenarios. What else could happen? My paper turns back into trees? The lead in my pencils spontaneously turns to liquid?

I'm pretty much at the bottom; as low as I can go. Nowhere to go but up.

Although, for a while I'm sure I'll yell every couple days because I'll have remembered another file that I lost. And, now that I know no one can ever truly be safe, I'm going to make backup CDs/DVDs every few weeks. I need some sort of triple or quadruple redundancies.

(I was going to post an image of something I've been working on, but, well, see above. So instead, and so there's something to look at, here's a photo I took of my desk in early November for some reason.)

Enjoy.

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