Last week, our 2 year old computer just stopped working. After a fit of panic, I took it into the computer hospital to see if they could save it. The motherboard is shot. Translation: our computer is dead. The computer guy says he was able to retrieve a lot of data and files, but it cost us $180 in labor to dig up the files and burn them to CD (not to mention nearly 2 weeks without our own computer.) All of my programs were lost (including Photoshop!)

What I wish I would have done is to organize and take inventory of my files on my computer every so often so I knew where everything was and what was critical. I had to recite from memory what to have the guy look for. If everything I needed was grouped under one folder, I could have just had him pull that.

I have a portable 256K flash drive with my critical business files on them: sales, inventory, forms, orders, etc. While I am relieved I had at least that, there are critical things that I forgot, like 2 years of e-mails in Outlook and my address book, not to mention my financial programs, bookmarks, etc. All these things that are so easy to forget about until they're gone.

I hope this never happens to anyone. I post my experience so that hopefully this will save someone from having to go through this. Boy did I learn. My new computer is going to be super-organized!!

Allison

Allison...

i totally feel your pain. one of our hard drives blew last week. it was the sound of death, a constant scrapping and no booting. stupid me didn't back up the last week and it was gone gone gone. you get so diligent backing up and then there's those few days you just let it go...and i never remember to burn my emails and saved links. at least you got yours recovered. we're still trying to slave the drive and the cheapest quote we got on recovery is 900 smackers. ouch! my family photos aren't worth that much to save!

this prompted us to get an external drive as well, with some suped up Gigs of space. Just wanted to mention this as addition to your mention. you can have so many burned discs laying around, but if you can afford the external drive, it's worth it!

(er..the hard drive was only 7 months old! ibm is so getting a call tomorrow.)

Ugh, that's the worst! At least you were able to salvage really critical biz stuff with your flash drive and some things from the computer guy. I hope you still have the original discs for you software, as much of a pain as it is to install them all over again.

As dilligent as I am about backup (I've got the 64K flash drive on my keychain and the 30GB external), I have never thought about backing up my email. I can't believe this never occurred to me till reading your post, but I'm going to run a backup of it asap! Thankfully I'm on a Mac which is generally more stable, but these things still happen, and always at the worst possible time!

Good luck getting everything back in working order!