back that drive up

After the horrible experience I have had with my computer (hard drive crash - losing client pictures - losing original copy of 30 page lease and had to retype the whole thing - buying all new software/hardware - buying new version of photoshop - working for hours to get sewing software to comply with new everything - setting up iTunes again - setting up iPhone again - setting up Norton again - setting up EVERYTING again - losing all my favorite sites and bookmarks in my favorites folder - etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc)..... I am reminding everyone to

BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER!!!!!!

Thankfully, yes, I had recently backed it up - but really only backed up my pictures - which was GREAT, but it wasn't everything. (I had backed up our files a month before that, so any documents created in that last month were lost, but nothing too bad - although Word documents are a hassle now since we don't have Word anymore)

Did you know it will run us close to $700 to get files off our crashed hard drive?

And thank goodness, there's nothing we need that badly. Thank GOODNESS!!


Here is some advice:

Buy an external hard drive. They come in Terabytes now, which is even bigger than Gigabytes, which are big. Point being - One Terabyte will be enough. Ours was $100.

BUT: an external hard drive can fall and break or just stop working or you get robbed/house fire and it's flat out gone... SO...

Back up your pictures online. I use flickr. I paid $25 for an unlimited annual private account. It took days and days to get all my pics on there, but now they are safe. :) My pics are sorted by month. So at the end of the month, I do a quick transfer to flickr.

Back up the rest of your stuff online. I use Norton. We already have them for securtiy, and it was $70 to buy extra storage. They check my computer regularly and back it up for me. We have very important files on our computer that we simply can't lose... court documents, lease paperwork, tax documents, and of course, our budget info - which is like gold around here...ha!

Make CDs. We have a safe and put burned CDs in there. You can do it by month or week or whatever is easier. Burn a quick copy of your folders and put it somewhere safe. Dude. CDs are cheap and it takes all of 10 seconds to burn something. Set aside an hour of your day and just do it.

All in all - our back up cost a little over $200/year. This is SO worth it. With all the headaches and hassle I have had the past couple of weeks, it would have been so much worse had we not done these things. My only worry was to reconstruct the computer. Had we been faced with recovery issues - oh my!!

Please do this.

The only reason I did was because I read a nightmare story from someone else. On a whim, we backed everything up, with NO CLUE we were about to have a hard drive crash.

Why are you still reading this? I've given you tools - go get to work!! :)