Friday, June 24, 2011

I had a moment recently...

Where I threw the worlds most massive tantrum known to man. Seriously, there were screams, bodies being flung on the floor, and tears. Oh so many tears. And it took me about 3 hours to gain any sort of composure back.

It all started a few years back where an electrical storm fried my mothers computer hard-drive. It was dead, and nothing could be retrieved. She even went to the extreme of paying someone to get it back, but it was long gone. 6 years of photos, documents and internet links gone. Just like that. The photos were the most devastating one, as my mum has sewn many quilts and photographed them all. And now she has nothing but her memories of them.

So, me being the awesome daughter that I am (I am her favourite child - possibly because I am ONLY child), I lectured her about how she was a stupid idiot for having not backed all this up onto disks, and how in addition to having disks, she really should have an external hard-drive that she backs things up onto as well. Just to be double sure. What can I say, I love getting on my technological high horse about things, especially when it comes to my mum.

Anyway, fast forward to a month or so back, and I was needing to write a resume for my current position. I haven't always been religious in doing backups of our laptops, but I do try to do them at least once a month onto an external hard-drive. I have it set up so that it backs up the files on our computer, and all the photos are stored on another external drive (I have three now). If anything was to happen to either of our laptops least I could do a system restore and have all my programs and settings on my machine reasonably quickly.

Back to the resume. So I went to my little black drive, and it made a noise. Not a good noise either. So I unplugged it, and tried again. And it made an even worse noise. Cue tears.

Three hours later, I was throwing myself on the floor screaming - my hard-drive have failed. And just to add a little bit more insult to the injury, I have never quite got around to burning the files to disk.

ANYWAY, the point of this story is that everyone should have at least their most essential documents backed up online on a service like Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service, and allows you to store up to 2GB of data online. Best of all, it works on Windows, Mac and the penguin one.
Pin It

3 comments:

  1. So THAT's what a dropbox is! My husband just downloaded it onto his PC and I haven't really been paying much attention to his rambling about it....thanks for the timely reminder!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've seen this happen to so many people before! I can't imagine. Definitely back things up on the new computer. I personally prefer external hard drives.

    xo katie elizabeth
    ohheyylife.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. I didn't even know hard drives could fail! What a scary thought!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comments. I love seeing what you have to say, so write away!