Very Scary Stuff

Thursday morning I found out some bad news. My hard drive was failing. For those of you who aren't so technically savvy that means that I nearly lost everything i have ever done on a computer over the last eight years. EVERYTHING!!! Every picture I have ever taken, every email I ever sent, my address book, my calendar, and every document I have ever created--gone!

The irony in all of this is that these aren't physical objects. They are computer files. They are electronic documents. They are digital photos. It is so odd to think that so much time and energy is devoted daily to files all over the internet, intranets, servers, and hard drives. But reality is that much of our life's work is stored on computers anymore.

As a result of my quandary, I made an emergency trip to visit to my best friend in the whole world. He is also very sharp with computers. He runs a school district. He also works in an apple certified service facility. We tried several different mechanisms for transferring files. Eventually we did the whole thing piece by piece. It took us all of the last two days to perform the rescue. We were eventually successful. If it weren't for my friend Willie, I would have lost everything.

Even better than saving everything was the fact that we were able to hang out. We did everything together. He taught me about everything he was doing as he did it. We laughed, we got stressed, we made it through it all.It's good to have friends to go through the tough times. Willie and I have been through a lot. He's a Shawnee. We're from the same clan--Eagle.

If you don't know him, you should meet him. He is super high quality. Right now I am still double checking things, but I think we recovered almost everything.

Words of wisdom--if you don't own an external hard drive, buy one. If you don't back up your files, start doing it now. Even though I work on one of the most awesome machines in the world, hard drives are their own beast--they can go bad at any moment. My computer was running fine wednesday morning, and really slow wednesday night. Thursday morning, it was dying. Back up your files if they are important to you!