I'm interrupting the usual program of craft and thrift for a public service announcement. I am terrible about backing up my computer. When I had a desktop, I never backed up. When Aaron bought me my laptop last year for Christmas, he also got us an external hard-drive, so we could both back up and protect our precious data. Despite the fact that I have all of my work archived on my laptop, plus works in progress and, more importantly than anything, ALL of the photos of my children, I rarely plug in to that hard-drive. Regularly I get messages like "You have not backed up this computer in 150 days." I shrug, laugh and ignore it.
I'm sure you can see where this is going. On Thursday, after watching a clip on YouTube and doing the hundredth email check of the day, I closed my computer and heard a weird clicking noise. I opened 'er back up and couldn't wake it up. So I restarted. Bad news -- rather than rebooting, I got a blank screen with a file folder in the middle and a question mark in the middle of the file folder. I knew it couldn't be good. A quick google search on my parents' computer confirmed that my hard drive was fried.
This story could be a tragedy, but... for reasons I will never understand, I backed up the night before the big crash. I don't know why, I just had an overwhelming feeling that I better do it, so I did. Maybe it's because I had just uploaded the photos from Ruby's birthday from my camera and I didn't want to lose them. Maybe it's my psychic blood (my great-grandmother was a fortune teller, but that's another story that I've already told). Either way, the pictures of the kids are safe, my novel in progress is safe and I'm $200 less rich, but I can deal with that. And I can deal with backing up at least once a week for the rest of my life.
So please, back up your computer. End of public service announcement.
2 comments:
That's amazing — you knew something was up the day before? I always say we should listen to our intuition more — those feeling we get are for a reason. I'm glad everything worked out! I'll tell you right now, I NEVER backup my computer but after reading your post, I'm going to get my husband's hard drive and do it as soon as I finish typing this.
Oh and funny thing — your great grandmother was a fortune teller and mine could ward off the evil eye for people. Weird?
That is really lucky! I just posted about how I accidentally deleted my blog a few days ago. I would highly urge people to back up or export their blogs every once in a while too! Luckily I was able to retrieve my posts from google, but others may not be so lucky!
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