Unfortunately, not a Scooby Doo episode, though it might be categorized as a mystery: how can a desktop Computer that is only four years old crash and burn?

It's every writer's nightmare. A few weeks ago, I booted up, and the worst message appeared on the screen - Hard Drive Failed.

Gah!  Noooooo! All my files are on there! All my kazillions of photos from the last four years. All my browser bookmarks, everything set up the way I liked it...

The good news was, I'd backed up all my stories in two other places.

The bad news was, the My Book external hard drive I'd bought with the computer never worked, so that backup system contained nothing.

Anyway, to make a long tale of woe a shorter tale of woe, I managed to boot up a few times and, in between crashes, manically copy files to CD and DVD (until that function failed too).

Thank goodness for Dell's Closeout Sales, too, because I was able to get a new CPU loaded with Windows 7 (yay! No Windows 10 nightmare! Yet.)

And slowly, I'm reloading the files from dozens of discs. I lost some writing time to unexpected admin tasks, but other than that and the unexpected expense, I can't complain.

I hope your year (and your computer) is treating you better!