Back Up All Of Your Data. Today!
The Empty Hard Drive
of Death
You’ve probably heard about the Blue Screen of Death and the Black Screen of Death, but until you’ve experienced the Empty Hard Drive of Death which produces the Blank Screen of Misery, you won’t fully understand the gut-wrenching experience it can be.
Think about this catastrophe: Everything you’ve typed, scanned, saved, produced, edited, recorded, downloaded, viewed and worked on, all gone. It’s enough to make even an optimistic and hopeful person feel PTSD coming on!
You can avoid the worst of those feelings by having an external drive with your data automatically backed up often. Or, you can have an external drive you manually back up often. The key phrase is, back up often.
You can also use a web-based synchronizing and/or back up program or just a very large portable USB device on which you save important files regularly.
This concept is like, “Which teeth do you have to floss?” “Only the ones you want to keep.”
“Which files do you need to back up?” Answer: The ones you use, the ones you want, the ones you created, the ones you will want again sometime. Which is to say, “All of them!!”
Right now, are you confident of never having to worry about losing the music, video, photographs and documents on your computer? What is the program, plan or device that is guarding them for you? Make sure it’s working, backing-up often and easy for you to access.
If you don’t have that confidence, don’t let another day go by without doing what it takes to protect your work, memories and–if you’re like many who live on a computer–your life!
I hope you’re not referring to yourself with this post! If you are, oh wow! Good luck with it. I feel for you even if you have a good backup program. My sister had her computer stolen and had no backup. She lost files she can never replace and three years later still cries about the things she remembers now and then that were on her computer.
Comment by P.A.H. | May 10, 2011
Even I can’t come up with something funny to say if you had serious computer trouble. Sorry if you did. Hopefully you were just talking in the abstract.
I want to remind you that I-80 is good for travel now, so we expect you to come up here and educate us soon. I need someone to kick me out of my rut again and you did it so well last time. I don’t know why I need to get a kick regularly, but it seems like I backslide if I’m not reminded often to stay positive and keep working at it. If you’ve ever worked in small town government you’d know exactly what I mean! Come rescue us!
Comment by wiseacre | May 13, 2011
Hello Tina! Great site! My wife is enjoying it a lot. I really liked the DT class and learned some things I had never even thought about before. Your photos were really interesting and I could tell you did a lot of research on the topic. I hope to be in a class of yours again soon.
Comment by H. K. M. | May 14, 2011