Ack! K.T.'s computer crashed last night, just as we were settling in to start the 7th Sea game. And I do mean crashed. The computer wouldn't recognize her main hard drive.

They'd purchased an extended warranty on the computer, but because it was a refurbished computer and not a new one, the warranty only recovers complete replacement - and only for the actual purchase price of the computer, not shipping costs. Shipping the broken computer back and the new computer to them would cost nearly as much as just buying a new hard drive, so they're just going to get her a new hard drive.

But she's still lost all her data. All of it. Programs. Pictures. Emails. Writing. Music... I dunno about music, that might have been on her secondary drive. I hope so - she had over 50G of music.

Some of it, she can get back. Lots of her pictures were online - but all the ones she took with her new camera that she got for Christmas - all the high-res versions of those pictures are gone, and it's the high-res versions you want when you go to make prints. The writing she's done in collaboration with me is online as well - but I know she had lots more than that, stories and unfinished bits and the gods only know when she last backed any of it up.

Years of saved emails - poof. The matching email addressbook - poof. Calendars - poof. A good portion of her gaming notes. And her games? I don't know if World of Warcraft stores any critical data on the user's hard drive, or if it's all on their servers.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for her and hoping that, once they get the new hard drive installed and set up, Kevin will be able to hook up the damaged drive as a supplementary and recover its data. Maybe it's just the OS sectors that are damaged. Weirder things have happened.

But if you'll excuse me, I have the sudden urge to go burn a bunch of CDs...

--Liz