I've had a hell of a time, digitally speaking, the past few days. It was Thursday evening that I was working on my computer when I heard that dreaded sound, "CLACK" from the left side of my laptop. It was followed by other periodic CLACKs several seconds apart. The computer froze instantly. It would not longer boot up. For those wondering what I'm talking about, the "CLACK" is one of those awful noises that a hard drive makes when it has mechanically bitten the dust.

Really, the most technologically antiquated part of our computer is the hard drive. I will consent that its really positively amazing that manufacturers have managed to get hundreds of gigabytes of space onto the spinning-platter-&-read/write-head model of data storage, but its still the technological equivalent of a steam-powered locomotive. The hard disk's time is long past. For our modern standards, its slow, fragile, and fault-prone. The day the last hard drive goes off line and we're all running on flash drives will be a glorious day indeed.

In any case, here I was, for the first time in my life: my primary computer damaged by a broken drive. Let me now thank the Gods that I have been harangued by the tech industry into backing up. Apple's Time Machine made sure of that; even annoying me if I went 10 days without backing up. Luckily, I had made a backup on Wednesday. It could have been worse. Much worse.

Let me spell this out for you. I have been using Macs since our very first family computer. I have, on my main machine, files that I made when I was 14 years old. I have every e-mail that I have sent or received in that time. I have my collection of purchased or transferred music & video. I have all the lyrics I have written, all the music I have ever composed. All my photos. The list goes on.

In short: This data is my life.

I have often thought that if I came home one day and found that my house had burned down (God forbid) that I would be okay as long as my friends/family were okay and my laptop were safely in my grasp. On the other hand, if I ever lost all that data, all my music, I'd be devastated.

So I'm pretty much an idiot for only starting to do backups a year and a half ago. I owned laptops before that, and could have lost my data very, very easily.

And even the restore process wasn't perfect. I couldn't do an automatic system restore through Time Machine unless I had a complete, bootable system on the drive, which I didn't (just my files). So I had to restore manually, which entailed quite a few hiccups (there were problems with file permissions, and I almost screwed up all my e-mail).

Do you have important data? Are you backing it up? If the answer is no, you are an IDIOT! Back up! I am going to have TWO backups now! One at home, and one at the office! Still not convinced? Read this article on hard drive failure rates by Google. Nobody has more hard drives than Google. They KNOW.

BACK UP!