Saturday, July 22, 2006

The Death of a Hard Drive

I returned yesterday from a college visit with Ryan at the U of M to find the dreaded blue screen of death on my laptop. Initially I thought it was a Windows problem, but soon discovered it was a dead hard drive. I have 5 months left on my three year service contract with Best Buy, so they are going to replace the hard drive, but they won't be able to replace the files I have lost because it has been 3 months since I backed it up. I am glad for Gmail and online newsletter programs that now protect many of my files somewhere else than my personal computer. Still, how important is it to back up your hard drive? I will be relearning that important lesson many times over the next couple of months as I search for files I need but no longer have.

1 comment:

ProgressiveChurchlady said...

To paraphrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Alas poor hard drive, I knew thee well."

In our house, we call this type of situation "learning from the natural consequences of our actions" (or inactions as the case may be.) This is a parenting term for teaching kids to learn from their mistakes without yelling at them.

more often than not, it seems like we grown-ups have more trouble incorporating the lessons we learn from our own "natural consequences" and we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over. Just think of the movie "Groundhog Day" and you get the idea. How many times do we have to repeat the same mistake before we do what we need to do to change things?

For all those nagging maintainence chores that are required to keep technological equipment, home appliances, and vehicles running smoothly, my husband (who tends to pay better much better attention to detail on this particular type of thing than I do--thank God) has now created a year-around calendar with all the regularly scheduled maintainance tasks listed. As our lives got more complicated, we couldn't keep them all in our head. This calendar has saved us from some major heartaches and expenses -- provided we look at it regularly and do what it says we need to do!