Monday, December 31, 2012

The Great Crash of 2012!

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The Great Crash of 2012!

Horror of horrors, it happened.  Just imagine, you have been putting all most favorite treasures in your closet for a couple months, and one day you opened your closet to get your things out, and the closet was empty!  Empty, not a video or picture file could be found!  You guessed it; the closet is my computer.  The great crash of 2012!  One day, it was all there.  The next, it was all gone!

As most of you know, I have been learning to use my new video camera, as well as studying Final Cut Pro X.  I am really enjoying not only the challenge of capturing good video; but I have been especially captivated with the editing process.  Well, now I get to start over with a clean slate.  I’ll sum up the tragedy…

I have been a MAC user for over 20 years.  I have only had to call tech support once in all those years.  My MAC’s have always been rock solid and easy to use, until now.  A couple months ago, I purchased a new 13” Mac Book Pro with a 500gig Flash Drive.  I wanted something with no moving parts, because I plan on bouncing it in a bump box from Georgia to Maine.  (A bump box is one that is mailed ahead on the trail with various items ‘you don’t want to carry’ from one zero day [zero day is a day with no hiking miles] to the next.  After two months, I had still not fully moved into my new computer.  Final Cut was the only program I was using.

On the evening of December 26th, I opened Final Cut to pull off a video clip for Terri.  (She was working on a Blog Post about food prep.)  When the program opened, in the place of the clips was RED caution symbols saying no clips could be found.  After doing everything I knew to do, I was overcome with waves of heat and feeling physically sick.  All of my work was gone.

For the second time in 20 years, I called Apple Support.  After five hours on the phone with six different agents, (they kept moving me up the food chain) I was no closer to my files than when I started, and even worse, no one could explain what happened.  This day ended with sending a disc image of my computer to the engineers at Apple to be evaluated.  I was assured they would be able to get to the bottom of this.  The next day they called from California with the bad news, they had no idea.

Tech support at Apple is first class in every way!  Some of the nicest and courteous people I have ever worked with.  I could not be more pleased (Well, I suppose I could be if they had recovered my data and explained the issue.) with them and how sincerely interested they all were in trying to help me out.  Every one of them E-Mailed me (while I was talking to them) their contact information in case we were cut off and I needed to call them back.  Really sweet!!

Bottom line, I lost all my video!  I had no back up!  I have some excuses, but none of them suffice to mention here.  The lesson has been learned.  I am grateful, it happened now, early on in my instruction.  It took me a day and a half to rebuild my computer from the ground up.  I now store all my new video on a one-terabyte external hard drive, and I archive the raw files from the video camera as well.  And, just as I always do with my computer for work, I have Time Machine running in the back ground to back-up the entire computer, at all times.  Let’s hope and pray it never happens again; but if it does, I am ready.

~Dreamer

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