My apologies for posting later than usual today. I have this thing where I tend to expect websites and blogs to remember my log-in information for me. Usually, that works out okay.
This week, it didn’t. At all. Because my wonderful, six-month-old laptop computer caught a virus, and I lost everything that was stored on it, including all my “cookies”, log-ins, etc.
You have to watch out for computer bugs!
My husband spent hours yesterday (bless him!) trying to fix the computer using all the antivirusy stuff he knows how to use. Which is a lot; this is the guy who built the entire computer system at our workplace. But even his vast knowledge wasn’t able to save the computer.
Fortunately, I had the recovery disks from when I first bought the computer, which was just last summer. So we did a complete system recovery. It wiped out everything I had stored on the hard drive, but it also wiped out the virus.
Also fortunately, none of my books or images (except other people’s book covers and author photos from guest authors I’ve hosted recently) were on my hard drive. After the computer before this one died, I started saving everything in Dropbox, which is an awesome program that allows you to access anything you save in it from any computer. You can install Dropbox on the computer or get to it through the internet. Sorry for the commercial break, but I was so happy yesterday that I hadn’t lost anything important when we had to restore the computer!
So that’s why I’m late posting today. I still don’t know what site I got the virus from, though I have a suspicion. The point is, be very careful where you go online, even if it’s a site you’ve been to before. And always make sure you back up your stuff!
