missing: 9 months of emails

Note: this blog post contains some whining and some computer-talk. If you don't care about that, please jump to the important part below.

First I want to start by saying that I DO back up my computer. Not nightly, not weekly, but about every 2 or 3 weeks I force myself to run a backup, which requires digging my backup drive out of the fireproof box, plugging it in, and letting it run overnight. I have software that checks for new and updated files, and copies those over to the portable hard drive. So when my hard drive went kaput, I was unhappy, but not panicked because I knew that I was only missing about 10 days of info, not my entire lifetime of info (plus I was hopeful that the repair company would be able to salvage some of my files). Well, I finally got my computer back yesterday, with a fresh new hard drive, and they told me they were NOT able to save anything from the old one. This sucks, but again, I have a backup. No problem.

So yesterday I started the task of plugging in the backup drive, and copying files back over to the new drive. Pretty much everything is intact, minus those 10 days of work that will take me a little while to figure out what's missing and what I lost. UNTIL I got to the part where I was trying to open my email. I used to have all my saved emails on webmail, but a couple months ago I finally ditched my crappy web host in favor of a better web host, and when I did that, I had to copy ALL my saved email to my computer. It took a long time. I had to re-organize everything in Entourage (Outlook for the Mac), and from then just started using Entourage exclusively for email (whereas I used to go back and forth between webmail and Entourage). Long story short, I ran into two problems. The first problem is that Entourage decided that it couldn't open its own database of emails from the backup. Why? I don't know, but apparently when Microsoft wrote this software, they didn't bother with making the email database robust enough to be easily backed up. But when I finally got Entourage to open a backup version of my email, it turns out that my backup software hadn't been updating up this particular file! It's been doing great with EVERYTHING ELSE, but my EMAIL database hasn't been backed up since September of 2006!!!!

For those of you who are already bored with this blog post, let me get to the point: If you have emailed me with anything of importance since September of last year, I don't have it. That means email addresses, business info, ANYTHING emailed to ANY account with ANY importance is no longer in my possession. If you are waiting for me to reply to an email, or handle something important, or anything, you will need to send it again, because it's gone. Even if you haven't sent me anything important, you may just want to shoot me an email to say hi so that I have your email address again, just in case. I don't want to post my email address online because I get enough spam as it is, but I'll write it out for ya... kendra ... at ... idreaminblue ... dot ... com.

Now I've got to finish updating my computer, and then figure out a new piece of software for backing up my data so this doesn't happen again. I also might switch to Mail instead of Entourage since Entourage keeps screwing me up. This is going to take a while. It sure doesn't help that we're MOVING in less than a WEEK and I don't really have time to take care of my computer.

thanks for the understanding.