Please, do me a favor....

PLEASE! Do me a favor, and learn from my stupidity..... I'm going to give you all some advice, and I really hope you will take me up on it soon, if not TODAY.

So, as some of you know, our laptop flat out died last month. The hard drive totally crashed. It's been a royal pain not having the computer around, but at least my father-in-law let us borrow his PC laptop until we could figure things out. We had to wait until the Sammy stuff died down a bit, and Matt sent our precious laptop to Florida earlier this week to a hard drive recovery place. Then, Matt dropped the bomb on me this morning that they emailed him with the terrible news that they were not able to recover ANYTHING! (Yeah, I had a good cry over that one.)

So now, this is what I want you all to do: BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER TODAY....
- Back up your pictures EVERY SINGLE TIME that you download from your camera.
- Back up any documents, tax files, to-do list, whatever as often as you can.
- Don't wait to back up stuff every couple of months....or, GASP, once a year. That is NOT enough.
- Just say this to yourself, "If my computer died today, what would I be sad about losing for good?"....then, go grab a CDR or DVDR and back up your stuff.

I'm forever going to kick myself for not backing up my stuff more often. It's seriously like losing your pictures, documents, etc. to a fire or flood. You most likely won't be getting them back. The thing that just KILLS me, is that the night the computer died was the night before we left for our California trip...and Matt was planning on backing everything up before we went out of town. ARGH times one million!!!!!!

I asked Matt to send the hard drive somewhere else, but I'm just not sure if anyone is going to be able to recover anything. When all is said and done, I'll lose about 3 or 4 months worth of pictures (which is 3 or 4 months worth of my children's lives undocumented), which upsets me the most. I'm sad about all of the documents, Excel files, and such that I had been working on, but losing the pictures is heart breaking. So, please, please, please learn from our experience and get to work! :)