Tonight as I was preparing to do my duties as Official Nag of the online Kiss of Death chapter, I realized that my KOD directory was not in the backup set that I had restored onto the new computer. That meant that those files are lost. Maybe forever or maybe I can get that hard drive working again for a short period. I've been making a list of the files I need to pull off, if the disk every comes to life for a few minutes.
I was able to search the internet and find some of the information. My critical spreadsheet is in the files area of a Yahoo group so that others can see what's scheduled. I never thought that I'd be the one desperately in need of the information. However, I was really glad it was there. I was able to get the tax forms from the IRS website. I had to check past emails to see what the number of the tax form is for Canadian citizens. With some effort, I was able to put things back together and send out my monthly emails to the instructors.
The lesson to be learned is to utilize other people's servers. I use Gmail, so I have my emails saved and don't need to worry about using too much space. (Well, I do, but most people can save their emails forever in almost 3GB of space.) Yahoo had my spreadsheet. The IRS had the tax forms. There are services that will let you backup your entire hard disk to their servers. I'll review some of those later. For now, use the simple, free services to make your life easier.