You are busy and because of that you may not have even noticed that our website has been pretty quiet. Very quiet. Dead.
If you have been thoughtfully concerned, thank you! If you have not noticed …. don’t feel bad – we get it.
You are not going to believe what happened – we lost our main computer’s hard drive. It crashed, broke, died, fried, whatever you call it. The computer is a gem and all of a sudden began to act a little wonky so we put a call into our friend and tech guru to report the issues. As luck would have it, he was going to be traveling back to his hometown from Chicago (where he now resides) and said he could take a look at it if it continued to act up. No sooner did we have that conversation than the computer flipped out.
Things were opening slowly or not working at all. We dropped off the computer and then we got the call with the devastating news – the hard drive wouldn’t even boot up. Nothing – ziltch – zero. Holy crap. HOLY CRAP! Mr. Guru proceeded to explain what was going on and started rattling off a bunch of computer talk that frankly didn’t make 100% of sense, but the words “it isn’t a big deal to fix” struck a cord. Hallejulah!
Until the next phrase; “what do you use to backup?”. Backup? BACKUP? Put a big dunce cap on our heads because we didn’t use a backup system. That is right, no external hard drive, no automatic program like Carbonite, zippo! What did that mean for us? It meant that while Mr. Guru was able to order a replacement hard drive and get the computer back up and running, all of our saved information was lost. Had we of used a backup plan he could have retrieved that information including photos, documents, spreadsheets, etc and downloaded them onto the new hard drive. Take a minute to think about if you lost every single thing on your computer. Scary, right?
We had no option; yes you can send a defective hard drive in to a specialist to see if they can retrieve the information but that costs a ton of money and usually isn’t successful.
One small saving grace is that the computer that died (Kelli’s) isn’t the one that we store most of our precious family photos on. Jim’s laptop has those photos because he is the photographer in the family. Kelli’s computer had mostly work related stuff which included all the business records, tax records, etc. And now it is gone. Lovely.
Needless to say, even thought we knew backing up your computer was a genius thing to do, we feel really dumb for not backing up. Really dumb. And sad, and angry, and frustrated!
Since this happened we have been putting the pieces back together; finding passwords to our accounts (which we stored on that defective hard drive!) and figuring out Windows 8! It is going to take a while to get the operation running smoothly again and some of the items we lost are a real pain to have missing. What a hard lesson!
Do not, do not, do not let this happen to you! Pick a back up method today and get going! There are several options:
- External hard drive – this is a hard drive that is separate from your computer and it is kept on site at your house. You buy the external hard drive and install it at home & then back up your computers to the hard drive.
- Off side backup services like Carbonite, Mozy, etc. These services work behind the scenes and automatically back up your computer for you. We did a little research and found that they all cost about the same. We are paying Carbonite $59.99 a year per computer for online backup NOW. The cool thing with Carbonite is that they have a referral program. When you sign up with Carbonite here you will get a $20 gift card (and so will we). That is basically like saving $20 off the yearly price, bringing it down to $39.99. WELL worth it, trust us!! (Our friend Sue referred us and told us about this deal. Thanks Sue!)
Setting up Carbonite was super easy – in less than 1 minute it was up and running. There is no programming, no behind the scenes tasks to complete – Carbonite does it all for you. Every day it scans your computer and updates behind the scenes. Install it and forget it, it is really THAT easy!
So if you have been wondering why we have been so quiet, here it is in a nutshell.
And seriously – BACK UP your computers. Please!
We hope to be back up and running as normal soon.
