I like modern tech. I am very, very fond of my little computer, and I'm even more fond of its connection to the Internet, source of all things imaginable. Plus email, of course.

So I was a very unhappy little camper when I had a bluescreen of doom, which resulted in a surprise reboot with gratuitous checkdisk, and the latter telling me there are some inconsistencies (as in there is stuff that is supposed to be used for data, but looks empty). Not fun. Not fun at all, and it makes me a little wary about the state of my hard disk.

Just in case, I'm now making a second, separate backup (because I don't want to overwrite files on my regular backup with potentially corrupt ones) and then I'll see what things look like. Also then I'll try to find out why the thing refuses to connect to the Internet... which requires doing stuff to the innards of Windows, and rebooting, both things I'd prefer to do only after backing up my data.

If you have a computer, and are not backing up regularly yet - go get yourself an external drive or two, download SyncBack or some similar backup programme (there's plenty of free ones around), and get your data safe. You never know what will happen, or when, and having a backup is a really, really good idea. I have had three disks die on me up to this day, not counting the currently maybe-not-so-healthy-anymore-one, and two of them happened during my thesis writing. I learned the hard way about the importance of backup with the first crash, where I had no backup at all and actually went and paid for professional data restoration. I was lucky and got all my data back, though it took a while and cost what was for me, back then, a really painful shitload of money, so since then I have been a conscientious backupper.

Please go be one too. You will never regret it.

(This, by the way, was written on the most patient husband's computer... since mine still refuses to grant me access to the net. Hooray for redundancy. Oh, and the whole thing obviously happened when I was happy to again be sort of on top of things, and threw me right back into the oh-no-I-am-way-behind ditch. Sigh.)