Armageddon Averted

It's ironic that I chose to start yesterday's post about Tech Tool because shortly afterward, I started having trouble with my computer. I ran Tech Tool and a couple of other utilities only to find out that it wasn't my computer that was having issues, it was one of my external drives, the Storage drive.

Repairing the volume structures didn't work. Formatting it didn't work. It was dead, something even the mighty Tech Tool couldn't have helped. But luckily I'm somewhat militant about making backups, especially of the drive that died. This is the one I've been dreading for years. This is the drive with all my freelance work files and family photos and videos and well, almost everything that I really care to save.

Several years ago, when I was still freelancing for a living, I realized that if this drive ever died that it would be cataclysmic in my world. My entire livelihood was on that drive - years worth of client files and clip art and illustrations I had created and stock photography. So I bought a backup hard drive and set it to back up every night.

Over the years, I've had other drives die, but it's never been much of a problem because for every external hard drive I have, I keep a backup. But luckily it's never been this one. Until yesterday.

But that piece of mind I wrote about yesterday kicked in once I realized that everything was going to be alright. I had complete backup. So, being me, I made a backup of my backup and simply began using the Storage Backup drive as my Storage drive. Now all I have to do is pop in a new hard drive and that becomes the new backup.

This tale has a happy ending, but it illustrates something very important about computers: eventually they will fail. It takes a little extra effort and expense to have a backup drive, but it's completely worth it. Instead of losing everything - my family photos, videos, illustrations, portfolio work, you name it, I lost a few hours of productivity. No big deal. Yesterday was the day I've been preparing for all these years.

Every little thing is gonna be alright...