Back in business, kind of

I have my computer back, which is good, but my problems are not all fixed.

While I didn't have a "proper" backup (such as TimeMachine, which makes a perfect photocopy of your Mac and lets you go back in time, so you don't lose anything, browsing history, sent emails, and full trash included) I did at least have pictures, music, and personal files saved from before our move to Toulouse. The idea of losing my pictures from college and studying abroad was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat, but those are saved. B has copies of all pictures taken since we've been together, so even though I lost my copy of those pictures, he still has them.

The biggest headache has been redoing all my preferences: setting up my email accounts with Mail, homepage, bookmarks (which were all lost), iTunes and importing my music, re-downloading Firefox and Skype, re-installing iLife, Microsoft Office, Roxio Toast....

Among the files I lost were my most recent résumés, some updated files for my Masters project, and tragically tons and tons of teaching files I had created. Since we've moved to Toulouse and I've tutored lots of kids, I'd created lots of worksheets, pages of incorrect sentences to be corrected, and I even retyped part of a book so I wouldn't have to buy it. All gone. I'll try not to think of how many hours I'd spent on those files. I had downloaded a bunch of stuff from BBC Learning English, so that's not lost, but I'll have to spend an hour or more finding the quizes and worksheets again.

I warned my group project members that I had some computer problems and would thus be a bit behind until my computer was fixed, and the first email response I had was "What!?! You didn't back up your stuff?!? What did you lose from the project? We talked about how important it was to backup! By the way, can you miss your dance class next week for our group meeting?" I can't wait until I don't have to see those people anymore....

The only silver lining is that should no longer have a macro problem with Word, and I discovered Spaces, which is a virtual desktop and lets me switch between different "spaces" and thus projects and have a less cluttered computer. For some reason I never realized I had it before, but when I reinstalled the system on my computer, there was a demo and I discovered it could actually be handy. Now when I want to work in Word and Excel, I won't have my Firefox Finder, iTunes or iPhoto windows in the background and it will be easier to navigate between lots of different applications.

Now back to redoing my computer and burning files to DVD (in case of more hard drive failures).