Good-Bye 2006! Parting Advice

As the new year quickly descends upon us, I am here to offer a tiny bit of advice to those of you who follow along in my artful journey of life. Are you listening? Here it is: BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE!!

Yes, mine is a tale of woe, a lesson hard-won through the grim reality of experience. You think it won’t happen to you, but it will. You will return to your computer after a day of joyful frolicking and will complacently sit down to send an email and discover that the friggin’ hard drive has disappeared. Disappeared without a trace! Why has this happened? It is a mystery beyond mysteries. And the why’s, should you discover them, will bring you little satisfaction because everything is gone. Gone, I say. The pictures, the music, the bookmarks, the email addresses, the logos, and letters, the web pages, the art work. All gone.

The irony is that you’ve been meaning to back-up the data. Oh yes you have. You say to yourself that this is something you MUST DO. You’ve read about it. You’ve heard about people losing everything, and you tell yourself you will back-up those important files. But then you don’t. You have considered getting an external hard drive, but $150 seems like just so much money to spend on yourself, especially during this holiday season, which is, afterall, all about giving. So you put it off. Or maybe you did back-up the data, once, a long time ago. Time has passed so quickly. Was it really two years ago that you burned all your important docs to those CD’s and DVD’s?

Take it from me– tomorrow, if not today, back-up your hard drive, or that $15o you were reluctant to spend could turn into $500 to $2500 that you have to shell-out to the mysterious data-recovery people who work in an unmarked building in an obscure part of town. They are kind and gentle souls who will sympathize with you as they kindly and gently hold your hard drive hostage and attempt to eek out remnants of sectors and partitions.

Now, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

POSTSCRIPT: Go HERE to read what happened next.

7 thoughts on “Good-Bye 2006! Parting Advice

  1. OMG- I am sorry that this has happened to you. I just bought a 320 GB My Book yesterday just because of this very same reason. Four year old computer with over 60 gigs of work. Backed it all up yesterday. I too woke up one day to the fated blue screen. I am sending you good vibes that the hard drive can be salvedged.

  2. It happened to me aswell, I had backed up but not for a while, I lost 6months of everything. Luckily the website wasn’t one of those things – that was backed up on a memory stick! Now I backup weekly……. lessons learnt as you said.

  3. Twice in the past 2 weeks I have had to replace my hard drive and so I feel your pain. I have been a backup advocate for a long time and I have an automatic backpu program going on an external hard drive for a while. I can’t stress enough how important that is.

    Here’s hoping for a better 2007!

  4. today is my mothers birthday. she died in august of 06.my computer crashed in october. i lost all the photos of my mother and my family. i just bought an external harddrive so that I can back up my files, but of course, it doesnt replace the images that are lost. i must dig deep within to find the images recessed in my mind: my mothers smile, her unconditional love, encouragement and support, and even the dispair, fear and suffering at the end.

  5. anya~
    I’m so sorry about the loss of your mother . . . and of those pictures on your computer. I know so well all the those emotions you described. Some days I think I’m going along just fine, and then something happens and all those feelings come back and overwhelm me. When I lost those pictures that meant so much, I thought “maybe I could draw them.” I know it’s not the same, but perhaps through the creative process we can heal our wounded souls a little bit. Positive thoughts are flowing your way.

  6. I’m rather late to have read this article of yours but thanks just the same for the constant reminder! I hate to lose all my data especially when I’ve worked too much on them! You see, I’m a kind of artist myself and I make designs that can be put on personal checks from fairy checks, Disney checks, dog checks, cat checks, even Religious checks or personal check designs!

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