Honestly, I was all set to blog more frequently, and then disaster struck. My home desktop, the one on which I do most of my hobbies and tech stuff after work, had died a hard death thanks to the failure of my video card. I had no on-board video to save me, and, to make matters worse, I couldn't even make a remote desktop connection into the machine. The failure had been so bad that the abrupt power shutoff of the entire machine had corrupted my Windows install. The only course of action left to me was to live without access to my machine, survive on the laptop that my wife had bought me one Christmas, even though my ownership of that machine is more akin to Marge's Bowling Ball.
Fortunately, a couple months earlier I had been talking on twitter with a person or two about home backup strategies, and I had bravely professed that I didn't really back up files at home because, well, I didn't have anything that important to back up. And then I remembered the bazillion digital photos that my wife has taken of our daughter and stored on my desktop, and I imagined the long, sleepless nights on a couch should anything happen to them. That evening I quickly ordered an external backup drive, sought some advice on twitter about free backup utilities, and implemented my own daily backup strategy thanks to and Western Digital.
So, here we are, months later. The desktop failed, and while I remain confident that I'll be able to retrieve all of my files from the original hard drive, I still have access to all of the important files thanks to my external hard drive. And, I got to be the hero when I told my wife she had not lost an entire batch of photos that she'd just uploaded to the computer a couple days prior to the failure. Don't get me wrong. Hardware failures still suck, and I'm still pulling together pieces to fix my desktop and considering a new box, but a personal backup strategy can take away some of the sting.