Computer Issues Update

Thanks to the generosity of a wonderful friend who's actually never met me, but felt inclined to really bless me, he did provide me with a new 2 TB HDD this week.  He also provided me with the recovery & restoration software, too.  No one in my real life was able to help me, or just didn't, so I am super grateful that he was able to really virtually hold my hand through this WHOLE process.

In fact, poor guy is now sick in bed and couldn't go to work today.  :(  Please pray for a speedy recovery for my dear friend so that he can enjoy his weekend.  If you're reading this, I'm praying for you.

Anyway, as of Friday, everything has been recovered from my 320 GB that stopped working properly.  My friend walked me through literally the whole process over the course of the past week.  He also introduced me to a teleconferencing software that is much easier to use than the one I used to use, with a lot more features.  He was able to see what I was doing on my desktop as I did my stuff, as if he were on my computer.

That is sooo helpful - yes, do that.  No, don't do that.  This is better.  I don't know that my friend is a guru in data recovery, but the only thing I could see was that I did have a drive, but nothing on the drive or that anything was formatted correctly.  And, it would tell me that it could format the drive for me, which I definitely did NOT want to do.

In my desperation, I watched tons of videos and read up on things regarding recovering data from a hard drive that has gone kaput.  My head was spinning and I wasn't sleeping.  Probably my friend got sick staying up late nights helping me.  :(

It took MANY hours and really days for everything to be restored from being able to even detect the files to being able to get the files transferred to the new external HDD.  The recovery program not only recovered every single file (I believe) that I had lost, but it recovered and restored all the files I had deleted prior, which was another 200 GB (about) worth of information.  That's a lot of stuff - thus, what was recovered and restored was a little over 500 GB.

It's going to probably take me weeks or months to figure out what I actually need or do not, but that is not a bad problem to have.  I'm eternally grateful for my friend beyond belief.  They are all my pictures of my children for their whole lives.  Losing them would've been devastating.

Too bad my friend lives about 3000 miles away in a different country.  Despite that our communications has a barrier because his English isn't as good as mine and my Spanish . . . well, is probably like 1/10,000 of the goodness of his English. . . . he saw the heart and desperation of this single mommy.

I'm also grateful he loves Amazon and Amazon is a great company.  They shipped the new HDD pretty much immediately and I had the HDD on my desk in less than 48 hrs from the time he ordered it from a different country, different continent.

THANK YOU, G!