(no subject)

Oh god I think I might have just had a catastrophic hard drive crash.

I think I might not have any recent backups for my novel.

I'm just going to flail and wave my hands hack at the troubleshooting steps I can find online, oh why is it 4:30 in the morning and I had to check my e-mail while I was up?

ETA To all appearances my hard drive is crispy toast, my last backup was in early May, and I can't get an appointment at the Apple store before Wednesday. WHY did I not take it as a severe warning sign when my file wouldn't save right last night?

I need to try to go back to bed. Self-recrimination seems unlikely to fix this.

It is pining for the fjords.

It is an ex-computer.

The figure that I have been quoted for data recovery exceeds my monthly rent payment, and I am going to pay it anyway, because I am on my nth draft of this novel and there is no power in the universe that is going to make me write those 16,000-ish words all over again from the beginning.

I need to automate my backups. I know. I had a Weird Confluence of Events that interfered with my moderately good backup habits (my external hard drive stopped working; my ex-roommate never returned my router to me, so I didn't get wifi set up in my new apartment, so I stopped using Dropbox as a way to share files between my netbook and my desktop).

I am still working some things out. Whether to spend money I don't have on a new computer, whether to make do with my netbook for as long as I possibly can. For now I need to buy a thingie that will let me plug in an ethernet cable to a USB port, since my netbook has no ethernet port.

I have many mosquito bites. This is not relevant, merely annoying.