“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” – Robby Burns (Scottish Poet)
You can say that again!
And by “that” – I mean no one ever really plans to pour a drink into their computer while working under deadline. It lets the smoke out of the computer, and is technically “alcohol abuse.”
But, sometimes, that just happens.
So I thought I’d tell you, as a volunteer participant in Microsoft’s SkyDrive Insider’s program, how using a little pre-planning a long time ago paid off. We were able to recover my wife’s important documents, email, contacts, etc. in about 10 minutes. The best part was that she could continue her work staging of the World Premier of her adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion at the San Jose Stage Company.
What follows may seem like a lot of prerequisites
True… however, here is how the situation played out in real life:
I was driving home from rehearsal – listening to a podcast. My phone reads a text message to me:
“@*&^%! #&*^! I just spilled a beer on my computer!”
Which, was robotically funny… but started the gears turning. “What are we going to do? How much was this going to cost? Was the data all gone? I wonder if the documents were saved?”
Answer: The computer itself was mostly dead. The time was about 10 minutes to get working again.
The cost… well… that’s up to you.
Here’s how the preparation paid off: