Back It Up or Misery

Well it happened again; just when I thought it wouldn’t. Not able to boot-up: a failed hard drive or maybe something more nefarious- a lousy virus. I was lulled into complacency and hadn’t done a backup in a loooooooooong time.

My Dell laptop is nearly five years old and has held up better than anything prior. I think I’ve owned a half dozen other laptops over the years (all other makes). I skipped the first model offered by my business, which was a laptop with no hard drive. Yes, that’s right a laptop run with real bendable floppy disks. But as soon as hard drives and DOS were out I was on board and I faithfully backed up everything…until this last stalwart convinced me it was invincible.

I was ready to purchase today, but as I explained what happened to the technician he highly suspected a virus lodged in my BIOS (or whatever) that is keeping my computer from recognizing the hard drive. The setup mode shows all the hardware found but lists the hard drive as ‘none’. And all of this with constant virus protection and automatic downloads and updates. In fact the automatic virus scan had been done just hours before.

If my hard drive is intact and salvageable that will be a miracle. Actually, my reaction to this event has been a miracle as I’ve taken it remarkably in stride. A few years ago this would have caused a greater emotional response. Fortunately I have my wife’s school laptop available, but everything is different. Where are my Feeds?…my Favorites?…all gone. Thankfully another post is ‘scheduled’ on Blogger to ‘post itself’ soon…and all my email is saved too. The spirit of detachment…put everything on someone else’s server or hard drive…I’m beginning to appreciate having stuff reside somewhere out there…wherever out there is.

So I confess I’m a ‘backup’ sinner and I’ll have to pay the price. For my penance I’m admonishing you to back up your important files.