Near Catastrophy

My husband had a near disaster on his hands last weekend. He is currently in his last semester of grad school and is graduating in a few weeks. He is completely stressed out because he has to finish his thesis, do a big project, write some other papers, along with continuing his internship and working. He decided that last weekend was going to be devoted to finishing his thesis paper, after all, it was due Wednesday. He made it up to 15 out of 20 pages--he was almost done! Sunday night I was going out to hang out with a friend who was visiting from out of town and right before I walked out the door I wanted to check the internet to see when the happy hour was for the restaurant we were going to. I picked up the laptop and the screen was black. Nothing was happening. I immediately gave it to my husband and he couldn't get it to work either. I told him that it was probably suffering from overuse and that it should rest for the night and we can take another look Monday morning.

At this point I should tell you that my husband has no back up disk/file/data stick for his thesis paper. None. He also had all of his research saved only on his computer. He thought that his computer hasn't given him any problems in the last 5-6 years that he has owned it, so why would he need to back any of his papers up?

I come home Sunday evening and the computer is still not responding. My husband had gone to his parent's house to see if he had saved any of his paper on Google. He found 2 pages of it. At this point he was freaking out. He had less than 3 days to completely re-write his thesis and retrieve all of his research.

Monday morning we take the computer out to a repair shop, where they get it working for a slight minute before it turns off again. For a minute there we thought his paper was saved and all would be right with the world. Not so much. The guy looking at it was a PC guy, so he didn't know what he could do to fix the Mac. He told us that it didn't look good. He then called his Mac guy. Not only would we have had to pay a ton of money to fix his computer, but it would take longer than Wednesday to retrieve the data. So that was a dead end. We then proceeded to go to Best Buy. They just opened up a Mac department, so we thought that maybe they could help. Their prices were even more expensive, so we didn't even stay to see if they could retrieve the data. I then got on the phone with my mom, brother, and my brother's best friend's dad who specializes in hardware. The first question he asked was if my husband backed up his files. I laughed. He told me that it could be a monitor problem or more likely it was the harddrive and the only way to get the files off the harddrive was to take it out of our computer and put it into another computer that is exactly the same as our computer. That wasn't going to happen, so we pretty much gave up. My husband had decided that he would need to pull a few all-nighters writing the paper and see if he could get any sort of extension. He got so frusterated that he decided to beat the crap out of the computer to see if that did anything. Amazingly enough, it turned on after the beatting session and my husband was able to retrieve all his data, my data, our itunes, pictures, and pretty much everything stored on that computer. It turned off again about an hour later. It is now a pretty brick. But we got what we needed, my husband didn't have to pull any all-nighters, and he turned his thesis paper in on Wednesday. We have both learned two lessons: 1) ALWAYS back up your important files 2) Beating the crap out of your computer really CAN work in your favor.