Disappointments, Time Wasted and Silver Lining

Yesterday was a good day. I worked on my new layout for almost 10 hours and was very happy with the progress I was making. I then took a break to go chill with my mom at the nursing home and caught whatever little fireworks I could, especially since we got rained out.

I came back home and worked a little more until I started to get sleepy. I saved my file, but then my system froze. “No big deal”, I thought to myself. I then did a forced restart and went to bed.

This morning, I was up by 8am and ready to get back to work. I did my lil morning routine, got myself some grapes and checked my emails. Then I fired up Photoshop and was ready to go. I open up my file, only to see a black page with red stuff on it, no layers to be found.

“This must be some kind of error,” I thought. So I restarted Photoshop, but still the same deal. I did a lil searching around in Google only to find out that others have experienced the same thing before, and that my file got corrupted. After trying many PSD recovery software, I came to the conclusion that my work may be lost forever.

I then decided that it was time to do a disk check. This caused some issues at first, but I was finally able to run it. Unfortunately when it got to stage 5 of 5, I got a “Hard Fail”. I then did a Bios diagnostic test and that also failed. To make a long story short, my hard drive is dying. I am just grateful I caught it in time.

Between this morning and now, I can honestly say that I experienced the 5 stages of death, but in this case it is the slow death of my hard drive:

1. Denial – For 2 hours straight I was in a state of denial that my file may actually be corrupted and was hell bent on correcting the problem.
2. Anger – This is when it got really interesting. I came really close to throwing my laptop across the room at least 10 times today. Really close.
3. Bargaining – I then prayed that God would work a miracle and fix my file. I promised that I would create a back up in case this should ever happen again. No such luck.
4. Depression – I then got really sad. I am still really sad.
5. Acceptance – I finally accepted that this kind of stuff happens. At least I can say I learned something from all this – to always back up my work files on a separate drive. Silver lining in the cloud? Maybe.

   I then proceeded to back up my files on an external hard drive and called the warranty company to ask them to send a box. The tech guy was annoying and kept asking if I did a recovery. I had to help him understand that I was almost certain that my issue was more of a hardware issue rather then a software problem. He eventually saw it my way and my box is in the mail.

So the moral to the story is: Get other people to do design work for you so that you don’t have to deal with this BS. No Seriously, please learn from my mistake and keep a backup of your work files on a separate hard drive. Ok?