For a Christian youngster, nothing was more terrifying than the idea of missing the Rapture. I don’t think there was a Christian teen alive between 1970 and 2000 that didn’t wake up in the middle of an exceptionally quite night, freak out, and then rush into his or her parents’ room, hoping that he or she hadn’t been left behind. (If that wasn’t you, do yourself a favor and watch A Thief in the Night and retroactively scare the crap out of your teenage self.)
Anyway, today’s tech wreck fits nicely into the horror and fear of missing the Rapture. See, one time, all of my documents were “raptured” from my computer.
In the Twinkling of a Drive
I was freshman in college, and this had just happened a few months prior. However, we moved on quickly, and I got my very first functional computer, a Compaq Presario. When I got that computer, I became a paper writing machine! But not just papers. I was going to town, writing poetry, essays, anything I had time for!
I was also downloading bootlegged movies and TV shows like it was my job.
I know. I know. It was wrong, but it happened. Anyway, I downloaded tons of stuff, including a virus. Sadly, I didn’t have any virus protection software installed as my free month of Norton had just expired.
So there I was. Just got home from school, ready to work on whatever latest project had popped into my head, when all of sudden:
“Hey! What happened to all of my files?!”
I had opened up My Documents to realize that everything was gone! It would be hard for me to overstate how much I flipped out over this because I went absolutely ballistic. And I’m not ashamed—no wait, yes, I am—too admit that there were tears. Laugh if you want, but my files had been taken and I’d been left behind!
An hour later, after all of my dignity was shredded, I calmed down and go to business fixing my computer. That’s when I realized that my drive was still registering as half full of data. “That can’t be right,” I thought. “Or could it?”
I tinkered around a bit and finally figured out what the virus had done. My files weren’t raptured. The’d been hidden! This virus didn’t delete files: it marked them as hidden and then disabled the “View Hidden Files” option in Windows Folder settings.
Relief, peace, and shame all washed over me. The crisis was over. Unlike Patty in A Thief, I did wake up from my “Rapture nightmare” to find that everything was ok. (Though, I may never look at an electric razor the same way ever again.)
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Conclusion
Ever since that one failure, I’ve made sure that I keep my computers up-to-date and protected. Get stung once, you learn, I guess. Data loss is no joke, though. Back it up, and keep your system secure!
Have you ever lost data or an entire system to a virus?
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