The "Anti-virus" Virus

A few weeks ago all three of our laptops got zapped with this nasty virus. Talk about chaos! By the time we realized what was happening, the virus had eaten all of my photo files that were saved on Little Man's computer, since I use his computer for all of my online work. (My personal computer died a year ago and has not been replaced yet.) The Girl's laptop got so messed up it wouldn't let us update or reinstall her virus protection software. She can no longer go online for ANY reason. Then the Mr's laptop got attacked and acted all wonky, but he managed to get rid of the virus before any real damage was done. So Little Man's computer suffered the most damage. And I was very upset. Losing all of my photos makes me very angry.

The funny thing is, the computer said all those files were still there. But when we searched for the files all we got were empty file folders. Grrr...

Yesterday, (being Mother's Day), I had the afternoon all to myself, just as I do every Sunday afternoon. I sat down to work on balancing the checkbook and make entries into my Quickbooks program. And guess what? The virus ate those too!

So I went to the help site for Quickbooks to see if there was a way to recover them. Turns out there is. So I read the directions a half dozen times and took a shot at it. Unfortunately, I didn't recover my financial records. BUT, I used the same procedure to search for my photo files, on the off chance it might work, and I found myself grinning from ear to ear as every single missing file began filling up my window! I could have gotten up and danced a jig, except I didn't want to take a chance that they'd disappear again! So I recovered all of my photo files and then plugged the computer into the external backup and copied ALL of those files. Now I know they are all safe and sound if another virus decides to attack. Which is more than likely. Sadly.

So everyone learn a lesson here: Go back up your computers!

Now I just need some luck finding those financial files...