Technical difficulties

My home computer started having minor issues a few weeks back (thinking back, it's more like a couple of months back, but I've been a bit busy). The first problem was the DVD writer, which refused to successfully write DVD or CD discs. This was a pain, as I had tried using an external USB drive for backups, but it didn't actually work as intended. That drive got RMA'd back to Seagate, but the replacement drive exhibited similar behaviour after the first few weeks, so I just gave up on USB hard drives as backup media.

With the external hard drive no longer an option, I reverted back to just doing local backups and dumping the resulting files to DVD-R discs. Which was fine, as long as the DVD writer played along. With the DVD drive not willing to play its part in the game, I had to come up with some other solution for backups. Backing up to other machines on the home network would be fine, if any of the other machines had significant amounts of unused hard drive space to spare. Scratch that notion.

So, I foolishly limped along without regular backups, until two weeks ago, when my machine started to reboot every few hours. That is never a good sign. Nothing shows up on the rudimentary tools I have for checking the state of the machine, so it'll have to go to the shop. No worries, just backup the current state of the drive and . . . oops. Can't do that.

Fall back to the final line of defence . . . copy the backup files to my work laptop (having just barely enough available space on the hard drive), and burn them onto DVD from the laptop. Except . . . the two machines won't connect on the local network. Double drat.

Final solution? Dump files to USB memory stick, insert stick in laptop, move files to hard drive, rinse and repeat.

That was when I discovered that I didn't have burning software on the laptop . . . the utility I was going to use was apparently a time-limited demo, not a freeware package. Triple drat.

Off to the dingy end of the internet to try to find a freeware burning package that doesn't come complete with hundreds of virii . . .

Well past midnight, finally finish burning the backup discs. What a pain in the ass!