Do what I say...not what I do...

Last year, my hard drive burnt out on my laptop and I lost everything that wasn't on my external hard drive. I wrote the post you will see below but did I follow ANY of my own advice about backing things up? NO! FAIL FAIL FAIL!!

So when my lappy's hard drive failed again last month I was right back at the beginning...except with no recourse or fun IT department to retrieve it all for me.

Honestly, it isn't THAT hard to back stuff up...I just never remember to do it...or if I remember to do it, I'm in the middle of something that I don't want to interrupt.

I know, excuses, excuses.

How do you remember to back up your stuff? What's your go-to solution?

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this past week my hard-drive failed. as you know, my laptop is not that old, so it was very discouraging to have this happen.

i have an external hard drive where i keep all of my files, so i was in a good position. but the hard drive can be a pain to lug around when i am working in different rooms in the house, so i also have an 'in limbo' file on my desktop where i keep things organised until i can get them onto the hard drive.

well, as is want to happen, i was procrastinating setting up the external hard drive so i hadn't backed up my 'in limbo' file for at least a month.

sadly, that meant that i lost almost everything that was near and dear to me that had been in that file.

thankfully, i am friends with some extraordinarily smart computer type people and with the help of two back-up hard drives, an iPod and a new hard drive, they were able to extract all of the information from my broken hard drive...including the 'in limbo' file, all of my emails, my internet favorites (which i use to keep track of ideas, inspiration and sources), and my financial files.

i was only off line for about a week, which is great considering what the alternative was!

this experience got me thinking about how sad it would be if this happened and the original hard drive was too damaged to retrieve anything off of. now THAT would have reallllly made me cry.

so lesson learned...i plan to back up my 'in limbo' file every night; i also discovered this trick...google will help you upload all of your 'favorites' to their system which will keep track of them on their server so should you ever be at another computer (or experience a hard drive failure) you can just access them from someplace else.

ok...i'm off my soapbox.

Apparently I wasn't off my soapbox...whoops.