#4: Back up data on an external hard drive

Note: None of the geeks I spoke with were female. No ankle-length skirts paired with ties and pumps in sight. Sigh.

Tonight I will be going to Best Buy, head hung low, to pick up my laptop.  It was sent a little over a week ago to their Geek Squad data recovery center where a young techno-wiz spared me untold guilt-riddled days by scanning my hard drive for lost files.  

I could tell you that it all began with a boot error that I couldn’t get around.  I could tell you that my husband tried to be helpful by (what he thought was) “starting in safe mode.”  I could tell you that what he actually did was reformat my hard drive.  

Instead I will tell you that I learned my lesson.  Tonight I will back up all of my data onto my shiny new external hard drive.  I am making a promise to myself to set up an automatic schedule for copying my data to said hard drive so that I never again feel faint at the idea of having lost all of my graduate school research, all of my iTunes music, and—most importantly—all of my photos from the past 4+ years.  

I have to say, this “something new” is the least fun task I’ve undertaken so far.  However, it did prompt me to do yet another “something new”:  Quote Al Franken.

 

Mistakes are a part of being human.  Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way.  Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.  –  Al Franken, “Oh, the Things I Know”, 2002

Lesson learned: One new thing often leads to another.