I'm having a bad day, so I want to share so it may give some people some luls if nothing more.

In about a week's time I'll be presenting my disseration so I can get my Master's Degree in Robotics. About a week back...my laptop died. I had EVERYTHING related to this project on that laptop. CAD files, research files, programming files...everything that I was about to put together to get to the end project.

ALL of it...gone. HDD crapped out, chance so slim to recover data that it's laughable...and zero time to feck around with it.

I had a larger, Win XP desktop PC that I rarely used. Decent specs for 6 years ago, I had it in the room in case of emergencies. Today that one died too. Green screen of death, it won't boot up.

Luckily I've done all my disseration work on a friend's laptop and my girlfriend's laptop - the girl's an angel for all she's been helping me with right now -. Had some files on that PC, but not vital, not that important...I feel like I've dodged a bullet, at least with that. My dissertation is 8 days away...had I lost stuff there...auch. 

Second on the list.

I've recently participated in a school project, a sort of internship for which I get some money that I really need. Apart from that money, 20% of those participating would be getting an extra monetary prize for the best projects. As it happens, there were some mix-ups with my class and it was decided - I was asked last and basically agreed on pressure - that the extra money won would be split amongst everyone. People had been bringing in projects from their work places, so I was pretty certain I wouldn't win anything and the extra money would help. Not exactly fair as I've pointed out to the others...but eh.

I won, together with a buddy of mine - the same who lent me his laptop -.

Now...the funny part is this...aside from the two of us, all my class mates have decided to not bother with the dissertation now and leave it for the Fall session. So...the two of us...are literally paying off some damn lazy buggers that couldn't be bothered to finish their work on time. The same people that have managed to delay EVERY SINGLE exam in the past two years of college, now are delaying this one for themselves and for this I'm sure the board reviewing our projects won't be too kind.

So...lost two PCs in the span of a week, lost money that I'll have to share with lazy buggers and for everything to be in the crapper, this laptop can't run my project almost at all, so I'll have to gimp it.

Am I cursed or have I upset some ancient god?

~Evil curse edit~

Title edited. Please see Rule #3!

-Ancient god

Welcome to life. We've been waiting for your arrival.

Why didn't you have a backup? Could have been as simple as saving everything to an external HDD every day . Seems like a small investment compared to the value of your Masters.

Why did you submit to peer pressure like that? You'll never get what you want if you just let that happen to you. A valuable lesson for your work career which will be 100x less forgiving than school politics.

Finally, I don't understand why you'd pick a school where the students get to delay exams. In my university you aren't allowed resits (ever), all marks are final with no appeal on academic grounds, and late work is an instant fail.

Everything you described seemed completely under your control to prevent.

Ouch, sounds like a shitty week. But hey, at least you did make copies of your thesis.

Cheer up!... but that sounds pretty bad man... at least you could recover the files for your project so you don't have THAT bad luck bue had it gone otherwise it could have been really bad xD.

Embrace the power of the cloud.

Backed it up in Google Drive and this wouldn't be more of a, "well fuck now I have to buy a new pc" type of scenario.

For a more compassionate response... damn that sucks. Had that happen to me many many years ago and from then on I always kept everything in at least two locations. Now I make sure its all in google drive as well.

Not saying it wasn't. I'm just complaining.

And this is the funny stuff. I generally have back ups on my stuff. Photos, music, games, I back up it once in a while. But my dissertation has been in such a fluid state, with things changing for it and the theme completely changed at one point that I had waited for everything to finally be clear before starting on it in earnest. So I put off making a back up. And I'm paying the price on that one.

And thing is this on the money. It wouldn't bother me if everyone else would have worked on their damn projects. When I agreed to that everyone was going to finish their work and submit on time. That changed. It's the laziness that's getting me, paying for my class mates to be lazy and get away with it.

I would recommend calling an exorcist and tons of holy water. A spirit is prob hanging around you due to you offending them somehow.

I didn't recover anything. I've redone everything from scratch with my gf helping out with the more tedious parts - translations, formatting, transcribing -. I've basically scrounged up all the CAD data from my internship place and redone most of the work. The computer breaking down is the part that got me laughing this evening...I don't even think I can get anything done tonight.

Sorry to hear that... I misinterpreted what I read :/. I wish you good luck with that man, at least you have someone helping you. I am sure you can finish it before the day you must present it. And who knows maybe this time your project will be even better!