Life.bak (why backing up is v. important)

I had a sleepless night last night after my beautiful new laptop – weeks old – suddenly decided it was incapable of booting last night. After a quick consultation with James it became pretty clear that this was situation serious.

leisa: so, should I be panicking about the back up situation?

james: yep

As I do with most things that concern me but which I can do nothing about at the time, I decided to forget about it as best I could, get some sleep and call a mass gathering of prayer for when I booted up the laptop in the morning.

I figured that perhaps the laptop was jealous as I’d spent a good portion of that evening setting up our new iBurst modem. Mmmm…. tasty wireless goodness.

And so, to bed. As if I could get a good sleep knowing that I’d not uploaded all my photos to Flickr but I’d erased them from my camera. Knowing that I had MOST of my links on del.icio.us, but still a whole bunch in my favourites and in other lists around the place. And my music…. even though iTunes *told* me to back up the other day when I bought yet another track (eh. its so easy to buy music now, but how quickly does $1.60 rack up!) – still that wasn’t enough to make me do it.

Now, I had every intention. After all, it wasn’t that long since I killed my last laptop…. accidentally euthanased with a glass of water to the keyboard. In that instance I was very luck and the very talented and persistent Ben (who I was working with at the time), was able to copy everything off my failing hard disk.

So, I’ve only just finished cheating hard disk death… you’d think I’d learn.

Nope. Not I.

So, last night I spent a good portion of my time smacking myself in the forehead and cursing myself for being so silly.

Fortunately, as well as being silly, I must also have been accumulating some good karma, because when I got to work and called the prayer meeting (to aid in booting, its not a regular daily occurrence!) the laptop started up as though nothing had happened the night before.

Cue behaviour appropriate to parent locating child accidentally lost in shopping centre. Lots of kissing, and happiness not well concealed by stern reprimands. ‘Never, Never do that to me again!’

Of course, today’s activities have included backing up. Painstakingly as I have not yet acquired a big old firewire drive that I’m advised is the hardware required for such a task.

Life.bak James says I should call it.

i know you know, but I feel I have to say:

BACK UP PEOPLE – VERY IMPORTANT!