a very expensive lesson

First of all, no one has to tell anyone this, but with personal computers you should always do a nightly backup of your data and store it offline or depending on how much work you did that day, try to backup every few hours. I learned this valuable lesson the hard way. Yeah, I pride myself in being very computer literate and knowing what and what not to do but somehow procrastination got the best of me. So I basically did not back up at least a weeks worth of work and that week happened to be a very busy one for me. Loadss of important data, etc.

So, as mentioned in my previous post my laptop gave up the ghost and with it went all my data. or so I thought. Like a mother trying to find a cure for her ailing child I carried my laptop to different technicians and each time I got the same bad news. YOUR DATA IS NOT RECOVERABLE. gen gen! wahala dey!

Kickback to service center number 2. So, Im waiting on them to tell me some good news when I realized I had a very important file on the hard drive that I forgot, (I mean procrastinated) to put offline. Right then and there my situation shot to critical. You cannot even begin to imagine my frustration when the bad news came yet again. So the tech suggested I take my hard drive to a data recovery specialist. special kini? lol.

Warning: If something ever goes wrong with your hard drive and you hear the words "DATA RECOVERY SPECIALIST" just brace yourself and know that you will part with no less than $400.

So I looked up a specialist in my area and took my laptop in. I got a quote for $650 which I ended up negotiating to $450 {yes! I priced it.. wetin?. lol} ( he said he could see the pain in my eyes and trust me it was there). Anyhoo, 2 techinicians, 1 specialist and $450 later my data has been recovered and I will be picking it up tomorrow. The hard drive itself is useless so I may just buy a new hard drive for the laptop.

On the flip side, I got a sweet new laptop. I have always used 15'' monitors so this one here will be my first 17''. I have to admit it does make a whole lot of viewing difference and its soooo much faster than my old one. Of course now I will always remember to backup my data and procrastination about anything at all is simply out of my life.. Never pays!

Sidebar: A little bit of nice belly warming news amist all the computer hooplah, I was nominated for 'Entrepreneur(Beauty and Style) of the Year' Category of "The Future..." awards 2007 . SWEET!

UPDATE: I got my data back today and I have to admit these people are pure genius. They lifted my entire hard drive, folder for folder... program for program.. wow! I was thinking it would just be a bunch of files in one folder but boy oh boy.. saves me a lot of work.