I’ve spent a large part of the weekend re-downloading video files after my entire 70GB worth was wiped out.
That’s what I get for my bright idea at 6am Saturday, when I randomly found myself wide awake, that if I’m going to convert the Rachel Zoe Project episodes I have in avi format to DVD I need new software, since the program I used to use is several years old. All seemed to be going well as I installed a new program and queued up the first episode for conversion. I went back to sleep and a couple of hours later went to check on the result. There was an error message. And when I went into the folder on my external hard drive, where I keep all my videos because my laptop drive is full, it was empty. The program had written an empty folder over the lot. The available space on the drive was 70GB larger.
Crap.
My only consolation is that most of the files were episodes of TV shows, including Rachel Zoe, which I now need to download all over again. Almost all my Hillary Rodham Clinton videos — speeches, interviews, etc — are safe because I keep those on my laptop drive as well, in my paranoia that the external drive might crash or something. I have lost a couple of her Secretary of State speeches. But there were some figure skating and Barbra Streisand files that are gone forever.
Shoulda, coulda, woulda used the software I already had, which doesn’t overwrite files.
Argh.
