silver lining

As many of you know from my begrudging comments, my dear Ricebowl crashed last week, just amidst holding a bunch of projects:

- SingCity
- South Asian Studies multimedia project
- correspondence with parents and CAAS

But I dare say that it's the first time I didn't feel quite so screwed up. There were many blessings to count and even more pleasant surprises as I restored him to his usual state.

1. By some pre-ordained warning I actually backed up the night before, even though backing up is not a habit of mine, and the previous time I had done it was 2 months ago.
2. Turns out Ricebowl has an auto-recovery installed into his dear soul (harddrive).
   
3. Gregory's ITAs were an immense source of help. Even though I could hardly ever stick around as they were fixing my laptop, due to rehearsals, they very helpfully kept it within their possession and rotated looking after it amongst themselves, even up to the wee hours of the morning. I honestly think this wouldn't be possible in another college house. Just 'coz all the residents in Gregory know one another so well.
4. I use Thunderbird (an email client), which, after collecting email from my web email inboxes, would automatically delete them from the webmail. So I thought, shit I can't even get my documents from my emails online. Furthermore, I had only backed up my Thunderbird 2 months ago. So all the scholarship forms, project mates correspondence and shared work... all gone. Or so I thought. SOMEHOW when you restored your Thunderbird profile to a new restored system, it sourced for all your missing emails since the last backup. Which means all my emails since the last backup were found and put into my inbox. Even though I couldn't find them in my email inboxes. Strange.
5. A lot of clutter was cleared :) I just had to choose the files I needed to be working with and put them back into my desktop.
6. As I was importing everything back (pictures, music, videos) and looking at file names whiz by, I stumbled upon plenty of files I thought had gone missing because I carelessly didn't save or deleted them. For e.g, the videos the bought from iTunes, pictures from secondary school etc.

The only real loss was my internet favourites. The only real hassle this is going to cause is re-finding all the links I was planning to go back to for my urban studies project (100+ sites), and all the furniture I had bookmarked out for my new apartment. But seriously, I'm far too relieved to be depressed by this.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I must learn to cultivate new computer habits. Save repeatedly and to an external disk space. Yup. And also create second and third portals to access all my files.