MonoMonday: Relaxed/Relaxing

I'm feeling more relaxed today, now that I'm relaxing and watching my backed up data gradually being restored from the cloud.

On Thursday evening my desktop computer went weird - it seized up and had to be powered off by a long press the power button (the "3-finger salute" of CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't work). This is most unusual as it's usually an incredibly reliable workhorse, which I built myself 7 years ago.

As you can imagine, my mood was distinctly monochrome for a little while!

A bit of diagnostic snooping indicated that one of my 5 (yes, 5!) internal storage drives had suddenly totally failed without the usual warning of being noisy or unreliable for days or weeks beforehand. Fortunately it wasn't the boot drive so I could still start the computer again. It wasn't the fault of Windows 10 as I have Windows 7 on an alternative drive and the offending drive was missing when I started it in Windows 7 too. It was the drive on which I keep all my documents (but not my photos, phew! - they're 2 other drives).

Happily I subscribe to an on-line backup service* in the cloud. So I'm currently getting all my documents back as you can see from the left side of the diptych - Amazon* very quickly provided me with a replacement drive on which to put them (a solid state one this time - I'm gradually replacing my mechanical drives with these as their price slowly comes down).

I'd forgotten quite how old the offending drive is - 7 years, so I guess it's not done too badly. (It's the one on the right side of the diptych.) In the past I've occasionally had success retrieving data from a dodgy drive by putting it in the freezer for a while (yes, really!) so I might try this at some stage as there was some less important stuff on it which wasn't backed up.

(I do have a local external backup drive too but I just use that as belt-and-braces for my photos, so that they're backed up in 2 places, but I rely on just the cloud backup for other data.)

Thanks goodness for backups - and if you don't ensure your data & photos are backed up, can my experience lead you to think about that...?! (Of course if your photos are on the icloud or Google Photos or similar you're probably OK.)

Many thanks to 60plus for hosting MM this month.

(*Other backup services and on-line stores are available.)