Back-Up Blues!

"Have you backed your Palm yet?" If I've heard that question once, I've heard it a thousand times from the lips of my beloved husband. The answer is always the same: "Not yet but I'll do it as soon as I get a spare minute." Of course spare minutes in the life of a working-from-home-parent are scarcer than hens teeth and are usually spent doing some other important task - like taking a bathroom break - so it came as no surprise to Mikael that when the batteries on my Palm Pilot died, I'd neither spare ones to immediately replace them (thus preventing the system from crashing), nor had I backed up the information on it. To his credit he never said "I told you so!" but I'm sure he must have thought something along those lines. Even though the address book section was on the laptop, the data for the schedule section took enough time to replace that I learned how important it is to make backing-up this little organizer a priority!

To further drill this fact home to me, the Universe decided to throw another lesson my way. I started my laptop only to have the hard-disk crash. Was my professional life locked in the system? Yes. Was I backed up? No! Fortunately my knight in shining techno-armor came the rescue and by managing to bypass the usual system settings was able to retrieve most of my files before taking the laptop to the place overworked computers go for surgery and recovery!

My lessons are learned. Really! I know I must back-up everything up at least weekly or face the time-taking chore of reinstating data - or worse, losing files forever! Humiliating though it is to air my incompetence and poor computer housekeeping in public, I now pass on my experiences to you. Back up your work - it saves a lot of time and stress in the event of the unthinkable happening! Oh and one more thing - make sure you have a list of all your passwords kept somewhere like a notebook or diary…..just in case!

Katie-Anne, 2001