Trouble in River City

I was having some computer issues last night, and wasn't sure what was going on, so I decided to restart. That will usually remedy the problem, but it when I rebooted, it never got past the startup page. I figured I'd try it a few more times, but to no avail. I then decided to call Calcutta, aka my brother Steve, who's a big Mac guy.

We used my startup disk, tried several options but no luck. At the end of the call, my brother said that it sounds like the bad news is that I have a hard drive problem. He then asked the obvious question: have I backed things up?

Well, I did about six months ago, but since then, I've done nothing.

There's still a chance that I can get the information that I need off of the computer, and really there are just a few things I'm concerned about. My pictures can't be recaptured, though fortunately anything from before six months ago is on my portable hard drive, but Puerto Rico and anything else since then is kaput. Beyond that, the things that I really want to get back are all the recipes I created for those competitions and the writing I've been doing the past month. I've written well over 30 pages of single spaced stuff, and it would be a real drag to lose that. It was all very much a rough first draft, but I had done a lot of musing and formulating of ideas, so I hope I can retrieve those documents. The pictures, the recipes, and the Book--that's what I really want to get back.

But this is a reminder to everyone: you never know when you'll lose your data, so backup it up today! I think I want to get in the habit of backing up my hard drive at the first of every month. And I think it would be wise to always have a flash drive handy where you can save important documents that are in process and do it everytime you finish working.

I'll keep you posted.