Hardware woes

After receiving my new (at least, to me) mobile phone, I commenced the process of bringing it up to the same status as my previous phone, more or less. The phone is of type LG G4, whereas previously I had a Samsung Galaxy 5, so there are many slight differences. The contacts and pictures came back intact from wherever they are stored by Google, but it was a different story with WhatsApp. Although this app does backup to Google Drive, it only does so when connected to WiFi, and generally the phone is not connected. All messages until mid-January returned, but nothing after that; also missing are all the pictures from WhatsApp. This is not the end of the world. Of course, Gmail came back in its entirety. I also installed the few other apps which I use. The phone's interface is subtly different from what I am used to, but I think that I have adapted now.

As it happens, there was an article in the online Guardian a few days ago about someone forsaking Google for a week. For me, the app which I missed the most during my 30 hours of disconnection was the clock!

If this were the sum of my hardware woes, then I would be a happy man. Unfortunately, on Friday morning, my mobile computer slipped somehow off its table and onto the floor. As a result, the computer no longer boots, which means that there is a problem with the hard disk. I took it yesterday evening to a computer repairman who lives on the kibbutz: maybe the data can be restored and maybe not. I don't have an answer yet.

What do I have on the mobile computer?

• Files belonging to the doctorate - my work, the papers that I have referenced, and extraneous material. This is all backed up with Mega, so I am not bothered about this.
• All files from our holidays - I hope that this material is backed up on an external drive which I sometimes use. In some cases, the original material is still on the video camera so all is not lost.
• Books - in any case, the books which I want are stored on the Kindle. Some of these will be on the external drive.
• Music - all my material is on my XP computer as well as on Mega. Other material is on the XP computer as well as external memory cards in my various mp3 players. There's quite a bit of material which I had downloaded recently from YouTube - of course, I can download it again.

So what is lost? I doubt whether anything important will have been lost, but it is very annoying. I have my work mobile computer which can access Google Drive and my XP computer, but not Mega. I can access Mega via the XP, and access the XP from my work computer via AnyDesk, so at a pinch I can still retrieve material (I was working a little on my thesis this morning - this now exists in three locations, namely my work mobile, Mega and Google Drive). There are compensations for being paranoid.

But it is inconvenient and annoying. I hope that the final analysis will show that very little has been lost.