Back that A** Up

"A**" being your data.  Last night after four beautiful years together, I lost my laptop to the blue screen of death.  I'd stopped what I was doing on it and was watching part of the opening of the Winter Olympics with my schweetie.  We were being silly and I accidentally knocked the laptop onto the floor.  Everything looked okay for a few minutes and then the crazy screens started showing up... DOS screens saying to hit F1, F5, etc.  I hit the keys it said to and it beeped and beeped at me, I felt like a kid getting her hand slapped for touching something she shouldn't.  Then it went blue. 

There is SO MUCH on that laptop... a spreadsheet with over three years of exercise logs and weights.  Another spreadsheet I use for scheduling and paying bills.  Years and years of pictures, most of which I don't have in hard copy.  Blog ideas.  Recipes.  Emails.  "My favorites" on Internet Explorer, that was a seriously comprehensive list of things I had found on the 'net.  Some were just interesting, but many were useful.  I categorized recipes in the favorites list into "tried and true", "canning and preserving" (a new interest I experimented with this year that you will get to hear all about as the garden begins to produce again this summer), different kinds of recipes to try, and more.  I had bookmarked yoga websites, blog resources, just everything... But I can find those again if I want to.  The things I'm really worried about are the spreadsheets and most of all the pictures.  Ack!

Not a single thing was backed up.  Not.  One.  Thing.

Hopefully it's not all gone.  J is in I.T. and he is going to try to recover the data from my hard drive later.  He says the problem is it's no longer recognizing the hard drive.  I have no idea how he will work his magic but cross your fingers for me!

And learn from my mistake, people.  Back up your data.