Backup backup backup backup.....

A dear friend had a financial blow over the weekend. Her husband, a finish carpenter, had all his tools stolen from his vehicle. It seems some thieves — who apparently had been watching for the opportunity — backed into their driveway around 2:30 a.m., wrenched off the tailgate of the truck, emptied the contents within two minutes, and ran.

It’s a shattering loss, financially as well as impacting his livelihood. Additionally, there are psychological ramifications — besides the sense of violation, he had a certain emotional connection to the tools he had been collecting for over 25 years and which he used to provide for his family.

Anyway, yesterday this friend and I were chatting via instant message and we started speculating what things we would be devastated to lose to thieves or disasters. The first thing that popped into my head: my laptop.

The trouble with a laptop, you see, is all the valuable data that tends to accumulate on it. In my case, it’s not just my writing; it’s all the photos I take, all the articles I collect, all the links I record…

This is why I’m a huge huge HUGE advocate of backing up computers, something my dad always hammered into my head as critical. He’s right, too, since backups have saved my fanny any number of times.

But a year ago I had to migrate to a new laptop, and for a variety of reasons never got around to backing it up. It came with a built-in backup program from Dell which wanted me to back my data up to the Cloud (NOT!!!!!), and knowing that my valuable data were vulnerable always nagged at me.

So, in light of my friend’s reminder, yesterday Don installed a backup program to my computer and we did a full-scale backup to an external hard drive.

Then, as extra protection, I also backed up specific files (photos, my writing, etc.) to another external hard drive.

I also — and I’ll thank Granny Miller for this — backed up my blog (Granny lost her entire blog a few years ago, a devastating blow).

I can’t begin to describe the feeling of security all this backing up data gave me, so I’m passing on the reminder to all you dear readers. Backing up files, photos, etc. is critical in today’s high-tech world, where data loss can come from any number of directions.

Please, do it today!