Dependency
I find myself involuntarily undergoing withdrawal. Cold turkey. Well, cold-ish.
My desktop, source of so much of my daily entertainment, information and political activity has gone tits up, thankfully just before the two year limit on its warranty.
The C drive, which is a fast solid state drive has gone to meet its maker, which in this case is Dell Computers. It will be missed but replaced: Roger, my partner in podcasts, to whom I turned for advice and help in a panic last night, suggested that the fact that I never gave the computer a name made it more likely to turn its face to the wall but I am resistant to anthropomorphising my machines. I’m quite sentimental enough when it comes to pets…
Roger, bless him, gave me sage advice and did an emergency back up of my Data drive at no little inconvenience to himself. His best bit of sage advice turned out to be: ‘ask Dell if they will mind if you take out the D drive so it doesn’t get reformatted when they fix the C drive’ and to my surprise and delight they said yes. I must make a note to consider his advice about how I should do backups in future. He isn’t happy with the idea of me relying on my ‘HomeCloud’ external backups. I think he distrusts everything Windows based and would be happier if I would learn Unix or at the very least consider going Apple.
Bless his wife Chris too, for shuttling me to their place and back. My tendency to panic and go all ‘fluttery old gentleman’’ was in full flow last night and the two of them handled it wonderfully.
Still, there’s so much I can’t currently get to. I’m not used to using the iPads for everything… (Which is one reason this posting has no picture to it.)
Grit your teeth man! You lived for decades without the comforting embrace of the World Wide Web and Microsoft gazing over your shoulders….
But, but…. (my less worthy self replies) there are people out there commenting on my posts! There’s stuff that’s updating… And how much will my passwords and security settings be lost…. And will the couriers lose the poor crippled thing? They didn’t ring beforehand when they were going to pick it up the way they promised….
Calm down, for goodness sake! Be British! Stiff Upper Lip!
Asleep in Room3b 
You need an external hard drive, you poor thing! Which reminds me – about time I backed my stuff up, though it is on at least two hard drives as well as the external one – laptop and PC. And there’s always the cloud.
Begining to be concerned about said cloud though – not on privacy so much – more on the amount of energy the cloud requires to keep everything up there.
And panicking is okay. My blood pressure goes into the stratosphere when computers fail me.
Be warned by my Dreadful Fate….
I do have an external storage drive… But Roger still isn’t impressed.
You haven’t flaming used your external hard drive to do backups on, have you? (Well, for a start it’s not big enough.) Failure mode #1 of a backup system: not doing the backups. Failure mode #2: not testing that you can get stuff back out of them.
The backups here all happen automatically, because I am lazy and I know I’d forget to do them by hand.