Why back up all your files - a cautionary tale

When you lose your credit cards, you cancel them and have new ones made, when you lose your keys you search the whole house and find them in unusual places like the fridge, but when you lose all your computer data there is nothing you can do but sit down and shed a few tears, and promise yourself that from now on you’ll keep backups. Well, promises are great, but they’re worth nothing if you don’t follow through, and that is something I learned the hard way.

It all started with my MP3 player. One day it simply wouldn’t turn completely on, it just lit up and froze. I tried turning it off, but nothing happened. I caught myself pushing the power button over and over for several minutes, even though it did nothing for the MP3. I figured I’ll just have to have it serviced, put it away and forgot about it for about a week, which is when the next technical disaster struck.

My laptop of four years was working just fine, until one day it wasn’t. I was expecting it would start slowing down and I planned to put all the music, pictures, documents and projects I’ve done for some web desig
Miami firms on flash drives or DVDs and store some materials on a server, but somehow I never had the time to do it and it seemed all the data was lost. I called up a friend of mine, who is a computer geek, his words not mine, and got him to come over. He had to take my laptop completely apart, but it turned out the situation is not as bad as I thought, because even though I would need a new computer, my disk was okay and all the data was still on it.

Happy as a clam I got a casing for my laptop disk to be able to use it as an external disk, sort of a really big flash drive, I plugged it in and forgot about it as soon as it turned out I have access to my files. I should have known that bad things happen in threes, and should have copied at least the most important things onto a second medium, but again, there was no time and I felt positive that nothing can happen. I was wrong.

I was personalizing the settings on my new computer, setting up my work space since I now had a PC and not a laptop, and I dropped my external drive. When I plugged it back, nothing happened. Panicked, I called up one of Ft Lauderdale computer repair companies and with eyes literally filling with tears made an appointment. Turned out that the damage was mechanical and there was nothing anybody could do. All my files were lost, this time for good. When I sat home alone, I felt like crying over the maliciousness of technology, the lost data and myself. Instead, I got to work.

I copied all the materials I still had onto different mediums, to have them in at least two places. I got my MP3 fixed, got a big box of recordable DVDs and a powerful external drive. I also promised myself that at the end of every work day everything that is important to me will get copied so that it wouldn’t be only on the hard drive. I learned it the hard way, but the lesson stuck with me, that when technology fails, there is only so much you can do to fix it, so it’s best to hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.