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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tennisfan Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5360 days ago 130 posts - 247 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: German | Message 1 of 36 31 August 2012 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I'm sitting here tonight, writing from a brand new computer.
Or, a brand new hard drive that is. Yup, that's right, my Macbook Pro's hard drive crashed last night, totally out of the blue, no clicking noises, nothing, just stopped all of a sudden, I restarted it, then it wouldn't get past start up. I ran the Disk Utility and it told me it couldn't be repaired. I took it to the Apple store and they told me the same thing. Luckily I was still on AppleCare, so they put in a new hard drive, but... I had over 200G of stuff on my old HD. I had backed up only a very little of it, less than 10%. I was stupid, I know. They let me keep the old hard drive and told me there are some places that you can send your hard drive to, and they will get your files off. But it seems like it's not a sure thing that they can get 100% of them off. one of my biggest disappointments is all my language learning stuff that I had, and didn't back up. My Anki files, for example... I had painstakingly entered 10,000+ cards, over three years.... and it's all gone. I feel so f***ing stupid for not backing it up somewhere. It's just... gone. I know, one of those "first-world problems." But it was where I kept track of all the new words I learned, everything, and it's... gone. Every few minutes something else pops up in my head, that was on my HD and now I might not get back. Great, even if they get 90% back, what if my Anki files are in that 10% they don't get back?.... etc etc. I know it seems stupid... an Anki file. There are children in the world who will go to bed hungry tonight. There are much bigger problems in the world, I know. But this was so close to my heart. "Then why didn't you back it up?" I don't know. Because I'm an idiot. I hope you guys are all smarter than I am and have all your stuff backed up somewhere. If not, let me be a warning and a lesson to you. They told me today that your hard drive is essentially designed to crash, and it could happen any time. It's not a matter of if, but when. So... make sure your language learning stuff is all safe. Please. 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4527 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 2 of 36 31 August 2012 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't discount your sadness as a mere first world problem. Sure, there are many people suffering in the world. And you're still healthy and all, no? But the pain you feel is still real, and the work you put into creating those decks was real too.
I hope you can get your files back, but even if you don't, at least you'll be more careful next time... On the bright side, （a pretty dull bright side I know) creating those decks again can count as one large review. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5191 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 36 31 August 2012 at 8:52am | IP Logged | ||
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So have you turned on Time Machine yet?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tennisfan Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5360 days ago 130 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: German | Message 4 of 36 31 August 2012 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||
Didn't have Time Machine mate... You can just assume that I did everything wrong before it crashed. I took it for granted that it wouldn't happen to me. I uploaded about 50G of stuff to Mediafire, but I only did that because I was running out of space on my HD. So basically it has stuff that wasn't important, otherwise I would have kept it on my computer. I'm a total idiot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 5 of 36 31 August 2012 at 10:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I feel you. It would totally piss me off if that happened to me, and now that you mentioned it, I'll backup some of my stuff, too.
Luckily, I spread my learning material over my laptop, my desktop and my mp3 player, but I need to synchronize it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| oefirouz Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4479 days ago 4 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 36 31 August 2012 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||
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You didn't use Anki's free online syncing/backing up?
My anki deck is my most prized file on my computer. I can replace everything else. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6105 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 7 of 36 31 August 2012 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||
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What a pain, I really hope you manage to recover the important stuff. And a lesson to us all.
On that point, what's the best way of saving Anki decks? I downloaded mine onto a USB stick a few months ago, but being the technophobe I am, I'm not sure if the files would be recognised if I were to try reinstalling them. I've thought about on-line storage somewhere, but it's all a bit strange to me. Any tips? EDIT: Just seen the above post. Thanks! Edited by Mooby on 31 August 2012 at 10:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 36 31 August 2012 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Let me put on my "programmer and occasional sysadmin" hat here. Yes, most crashed hard drives can be recovered. It would probably cost at least $700, give or take a fair bit. And you can say, "The only thing I care about is my Anki deck. If you can't save that, please don't charge me." This is a huge amount of money, because somebody needs to dress up in one of those "bunny suits" and manually rebuild your hard drive in a clean room. Generally it's not worth the money, unless (1) you just lost all your business records, or (2) you have quite a bit of money and you just lost 10 years of photos of your kids. Several years ago, one of my employers had an array of 6 drives that suffered 3 independent hardware failures in one very bad night. Over Christmas vacation, of course. One month after our sysadmin quit. We called around to some sysadmin friends and everyone gave us the same answer: Contact DriveSavers. Drive Savers This was a tricky custom recovery, because it wasn't just a single failed drive, but an obsolete RAID array that "striped" data out over multiple failed drives, all according to parameters that had been lost during the crash. But DriveSavers put it all back together, and we recovered everything. The price was painful, but the service was first-class. There are other drive recovery companies out there, some of which are definitely cheaper than DriveSavers. But be really careful with online reviews—at least one of the big companies in this space appears to be paying for fake online reviews of themselves and their competitors. It would be better to ask around for personal recommendations. If $700+ dollars sounds like a lot of money, everybody, please make backups. Hard drives fail. I've personally lost 2 or 3 in 15 years. You will eventually lose one. As for Anki: Everybody, please use the online sync feature. You may also want to upgrade to Anki 2 as soon as it comes out of beta, because the sync works better. Edited by emk on 31 August 2012 at 1:11pm 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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