What can crash without injuring anyone?

I’ve spent most of Sunday evening and all day Monday working on a family video of my sister’s memorial service.  If you have worked with production videos, you will understand the time and effort involved in this venture.  Just figuring how to get several types of media onto the hard drive where I could have it all together was a pain.  As technology progresses and new pieces are purchased, you find that they often don’t necessarily want to play nice with one another, or sometimes even talk to each other.

So I finally got all my several types of media together, worked to integrate them into a video file, and in turn worked that into a burnable DVD file.  I set the task of burning the file and since it takes a while, I left the room.  Hadn’t been gone long when I heard the most AWFUL noise.  

If you have ever tried to teach someone how to drive a stick shift, you might recognize the noise…only this was a LOT louder.  It was the sound of my hard drive devouring itself I imagine.  I can only think of sending a hard drive through a shredder.  It was that awful.

Of course, the machine is toast so the shutdown doesn’t work so all I could do was hold down on the power switch until it went off.  It did not die easy.  Luckily I had backed up the media files to an  external hard drive but my rendered video file is no doubt chewed into little tiny bits (or bytes).  I am taking the machine in to my friend, Amy, tomorrow.  She owns a computer store and that’s where I got my laptop several years ago.  It has never given me a bit of trouble.  Unfortunately, it is older and slower and not up to the task of creating DVDs, especially ones that run to over an hour!  I like a laptop for traveling but it is hard for me to see the screen and work with the smaller keyboard for big projects.

Oh my, if it’s not one thing it’s another.   Hopefully some data can be extracted from my hard drive.  I have an external backup but am not sure when I last backed up.  Not too long ago I hope.  Some of my programs were purchased as downloads so don’t know if that will be a problem.  Guess time will tell.

In the meantime, the word for the day is always backup your work and if your computer makes a funny noise, get it checked out right away.  Oh, I didn’t tell you that did I??  It has been rather more noisy than usual lately and I kept telling myself it would go to the shop as soon as I was finished with the DVD project.  Famous last words!!  It’s all good, I’m fine, and I am definitely not losing my mind, really, I’m not…that maniacal laugh you hear is just your imagination….