Well, up the street a block or so.
The other day our school officer called the office because he was afraid we would get panic calls from parents because there was a major police presence just up the street from the school.
He wanted to tell us that there was nothing to worry about. They had tried to serve a warrant on someone, who happened to ram a police car trying to get away. Fortunately, the suspect didn’t get away, which was why there was nothing to worry about.
It took me about 3 hours. Had to download and install the payroll program, find my authorization code for it, download and install the most current tax tables, find the company’s latest backup file and re input the last payroll.
I now have pdf files of the W-2s, the W-3, all 4 quarters of 941s and the year end 940. Yesterday I installed the new payroll program and recreated the one pay period that I lost in about 2 hours. Everything is back as it should be.
Oh, and did I mention that I now have 3 back up copies of all my payroll information? Yup, if they all crash at the same time, I’ll just give up, but for now all is good.
Computers suck. We rely on them heavily, and then they just break down, out of nowhere their hard drive crashes and we lose everything we’ve got.
Then we became smart enough to keep a backup of our important stuff. Now we’re safe, if either goes bad, we’ll still have one copy of our information.
Until two hard drives go belly up within a week and a half of each other. Which, you all probably know, happened to me this month.
Well, yesterday I got the call from the Geek Squad™ that they were done retrieving the information off my original backup drive. I went down there to pick it up and find out how things went.
They told me that they were able to save some 590GB of the 620+GB that was on there. The disk went down in flames before they could get the rest. I headed home fearing the worst, that the missing 40GB was the REALLY important stuff.
I got home, plugged the new 3TB hard drive into the new computer and waited for it to install the driver. Then I started going through the stuff they had saved. I was looking for a folder named “MyEverything”, which had all my financial information and all the information for the payroll I do. It was there, completely intact. All I lost were pictures, which have their very own hard drive which was not a part of the crash of 2012.
So, all I ended up losing was the stuff I did between the backup hard drive crash and the computer crash. The week that I printed the W-2 forms and their first payroll of the year. I’m going to have to recreate the end of the year stuff and re input all the employee data, which will take a lot of my weekend but at least all is not completely lost.
With the original photo hard drive, the first new backup drive and the second one I purchased to have the info transferred onto, I’m now going to have three (3) backups of my vital information. And I set up my backing-up program to automatically back up everything every day, in the wee hours of the morn.
Now the big question is: Can four hard drives crash simultaneously? Because I’m not going to wait a week next time to go out and get a replacement for a bad hard drive. No way.
and my mouse is missing....