A Dead Hard Drive Doesn’t Have To Be Stressful

When things go wrong, patience and perspective go a long way, but having a good backup plan is even better.

Going into the long weekend I encountered a less-than-welcome hard drive failure on my PC.

This is the hard drive that holds my photos, music, my first two books and the chapters for a third and all of the emails and documents that come from the interaction of my home and work lives. I tried not to panic, especially because I am luckily married to someone who fixes computers every day. It was my husband’s day off, so I would break the news carefully and as nonchalantly as I could muster.

He saved me from making the 45-minute service call that would have most likely been much longer if I had made the call. A technician will swap out the drive and see if there are any other issues early next week. Everything should be OK, but there are still twinges of panic when I realize how integral this machine has been to my everyday life.

I still had access to everything stored in the cloud via one of the several other computers in the house. I could rest assured that the backups I had done of my hard drive would protect what was stored locally. My email was accessible via the web and on my smartphone.

The weekend then got filled with housework, dog walks, a complete reading of each day’s newspapers, a trip to the movies, random flipping through magazines that I had previously skimmed and the hanging of holiday lights. I try to disconnect on most weekends by choice, but this weekend I was unplugged by necessity.

Tech breakdowns happen, just like car accidents, illnesses and bad traffic. But unlike illness and traffic, you can prepare for tech breakdowns. If you don’t have a data back-up plan, take this as a head’s up that you should get a plan in place. Imagine losing everything on your computer, absolutely everything. It is unsettling isn’t it?

Even if I were to lose everything, I think of what options I had. Did I email my husband those chapters? Did I upload pictures to Facebook or Picasa? Could I re-rip my CDs or re-download songs I bought online? I quickly regretted just cleaning out my old emails stored in the webmail folders, what horrible timing? I will have to just wait until my computer is back online to recover via my backup.

I can handle this. Perhaps I have become too dependent on technology? I contemplate this after just getting off the phone with my cellphone provider. It seems that the data connection on my smartphone is out and that they don’t have a fix just yet. Time to grab the dog leashes, hook up the dogs and head down to the lake!