cats know best

Today I was forced to take a longer break than planned. Lupin was keen to enjoy the warmth of the sun while resting on my ankles. She probably knew that I needed to slow down. Maybe she just loves me very much. It is hard to tell with cats. I enjoyed my enforced break. 

I am exhausted. Entirely self-inflicted worries I should add. I nearly ended me career. If I tell you what I did, you'll be wondering how this woman could ever have earned a PhD.  

So my laptop has been a bit sluggish lately and I decided to do a proper clean-up. I was tired when I started and should have just left it but of course I didn't. After successfully cleaning up my disk and memory such that all was fine, I had that fabulous idea to make it better still. I decided to check if I had any duplicate files that I could delete, just for good measure, not because I thought I had many or because there was any need for it. So I used an app to identify these. It found a few,  ~ 98,000 actually. Now somebody with any common sense would have found that a bit odd. Do I even have that many files? Most seemed very foreign

Alas. I prompted the app to remove the duplicates. I was watching the telly, every now and then gazing at the files flashing past and into a black hole. About an hour in and a bit fed-up I noticed a file flash by for deletion that I was fairly certain I only had one of because it was a brand new lecture recording made with an external professional just the day before. I watched it disappear. My heart sunk. I paused the process and checked in my file folders, brain now fully alert and shouting unmentionable abuse at me. My heart sunk some more. I went to bed and tried to ignore the disaster that I had just unleashed upon myself. During the night I also remembered that everything I delete on my laptop is synchronised with my OneDrive. So all deleted files on my laptop are also deleted on my OneDrive.

The next morning I considered my options (handing in my notice, pretending ignorance, run away, blame the dog). 

Then I noticed an email from my OneDrive, notifying me of an unusually high number of recently deleted files. Had I meant to delete all these? I found the restore button in about 100 milliseconds flat and restored ~34,000 files to my OneDrive, which where then all synchronised back onto my laptop. The day was saved. 

To end a long story, only files that synchronise with my OneDrive were restored, all the rest is gone. I have no idea what these were, system files probably. About 15 gb worth of files that may yet become essential. My laptop is running super fast. 

So, if you are tired, take a rest. Don't try to do something for which you need an alert mind. 

Thanks for visiting 😊