Especially in this technology-infested era: Always backup your files. My hard drive has now crashed twice in the last two and a half months.

On January 2, I accidentally spilled some juice in my bag – my laptop happened to be there as well. After cleaning it up (and shaking out the laptop), I get to work. Twenty minutes later, I hear clicking. A few minutes after that, it locks up. And doesn’t restart. The last time I backed up my work was two week before; the last time I backed up email, Quicken, and non-work files? Four months before. Because I continued to use it after the clicking, the data recovery specialists told me the drive was impossible to recover.

Fast-forward to yesterday morning, when I go into the babies’/office room and hear light clicking. Laptop not responsive. Restart, still not responsive. Last backups? See above paragraph. (Yeah, I’m dumb.)

This time there might be hope, though. I took it to the Apple store last night, and they couldn’t even get it to boot with an external drive. So there’s a chance nothing has happened to the hard drive. The laptop is currently at another Apple store (that’s certified to do repairs) – if they can just pull the data off the hard drive and save it to an external drive, I will be relieved.

I’m kind of…over the idea that the data is gone? I dunno. It’s upsetting, but it’s not. More than anything, I’m just thinking that I need to learn from my mistakes and get into the habit of backing up. Especially when a voice in the back of my head has been repeatedly telling me to backup.

I won’t get into whether or not this is Apple’s fault for having buggy hardware. The lesson to take away is to backup, and backup often. I’ve had 14 years of good luck with data (aside from a specific and lethal combo of my Sony Vaio laptop and any external drive that corrupted and vanished 30 gigs of my precious MP3s; the day music for me died). When I backed up, it was to wipe the hard drive clean and start fresh. Bad habit. Learn from my mistakes.

(Not only is this a public service announcement, but I post this because it directly affects my TCC work. Can’t really keep the site moving if you lose your newest work, right?)