Saved
I hate it when they’re right. Thank God I listened and did as I had been told. I’m also just as happy that there was no one there, standing next to me saying “I toldja so!” and nodding vigorously. Nope. There was just my sister-in-law saying “Yup. Good thing you did that.”
For some completely unknown reason, my brand new computer (which I am loving!) decided that it didn’t want to work. I was working on it Thursday morning in my normal way. I had to go out to take my daughter somewhere, so I shut it down and went out. When I got back, I started it up. It happily came on and then froze within a minute of starting. I turned it off, waited a minute, turned it back on. It did it again. And again. Then I got the “blue screen of death” and it said that to start I would “need to insert a bootable disk” (into a computer that has no disk drive) besides the fact that I don’t have a bootable disk!
Did I freak out? No. I am very happy to say that I kept calm. My brother, a computer whiz who has taken apart, and even more importantly, put together many computers in his life just so happens to be visiting me for the week with his lovely family. He knew just what to do – he ran a disk check. Turns out there were a number of “bad sectors” on my hard drive. How they got there no one knows. But he got the computer to fix itself while we all went out for a nice Ethiopian dinner. And all I could say was “Thank God I backed up! Thank God I backed up!”
If, for some reason, the fix didn’t work, I was ok. All but the most recent, minor changes that I had done the day before were saved elsewhere, most of it was actually saved in two elsewheres – I double back-up. I save all of my most important Word documents (my writing) to a cloud-based drive (Microsoft’s SkyDrive where they give you 25 gigs of space for free) and I have a physical external hard drive where I back up all of my files (music, pictures, everything) once a week. If I know I’m going to be working on a particular story somewhere outside of my home, I’ll email it to myself, so I’ve also got backups in my gmail account as well, they’re just not usually as recent.
The point is, even if my hard disk had crashed, burned and died, I was ok. And these things just happen – for no reason! At any time! This is a brand new computer (ok, it’s a refurbished one, but still…). When was the last time you backed up your most important work? And what about everything else? My brother even suggested buying an enormous external hard drive (the one I have is smaller than the hard drive built into my computer) and “cloning” my hard drive so that if this ever happens again, I will not only have all of my files saved, but my programs too. I’m looking into doing that today.
