Sadly, I have been unable to do any meaningful research for about two weeks now. I just wanted to let you know why. First, I was having second thoughts about retirement and I had a deadline to turn in papers by 5/1. So I was debating with myself about that. Then, the hard drive on my laptop died and I had to replace it. Then the Lacie external hard drive, which had all my genealogical documents, all of my photos since the beginning of photography in our family and all of my music, also failed before I could copy them onto my new, improved, spacious laptop hard drive. I thought that I had been backing it up on Time Machine as well. But I was wrong. So now I have the added expense of seeing if the files can be recovered. If not, then I have lost an undetermined amount of research. On the bright side, I found a copy of my photo library and music library that I had backed up at the end of February on another computer. So only about two months of photos and music are actually missing. The music was not a big deal. Most of that was on CDs and just needed to be put back on the computer. And I don’t think I took any really important photos during that time period. But the bad thing was that I had research that had not been indexed nor added to my genealogy software and have no way to reconstruct that without having the files on the external drive recovered. Please keep your fingers crossed for me.
Anyway, I have been pretty busy trying to straighten all this out as best as can be. I have determined that the laptop hard drive failure was simply due to aging and the failure of the Lacie external drive (which is considered a very dependable drive) was due to a loose connection at the USB hub that was interrupted one too many times before I realized it, not the drive’s fault.
As to my retirement decision, I have determined that I should wait about three more years before attempting to jump ship again.
So, I think I can start thinking about researching and indexing the German records again and hopefully I will soon have something worth posting to the blog.
In closing, let me just share some advice: BACK IT UP OFTEN. :)
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