It was a momentous weekend. Everything changed and had to be reassessed. The past will never quite be the same and the future will look a little different, because of the events that happened this weekend.
Unfortunately, I am not talking about the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special, which thankfully lived up pretty much to expectations (and look out for the “Five Doctors(ish) Reboot” spoof; even the Lovely Wife found that hilarious and she doesn’t get all the in jokes).
Nor am I not talking about the true beauty of the Dalek cupcakes that appeared from nowhere to invade first the kitchen and then my stomach.
No. It was the weekend when the Daleks were not the only user of technology that ended up destroyed.
I operate out of two laptops – a work and a home one. Both had hard disk crashes this weekend, apparently entirely coincidentally. I was not impressed.
I was even less impressed when my iPhone decided to commit suicide by refusing to charge, no matter what I tried. As I watched the battery slowly dropping, the increasingly frustrating idiot (I am sorry, but he was) on the end of the phone waffled his way through the blatantly obvious stuff before thirty minutes later coming to the conclusion it was probably a software problem and I should talk to Apple. So I can get the software upgraded. Well thank you. Now the battery is dead, so how am I supposed to do that now, young man, hmm? (Just channelling a bit of First Doctor there, you understand).
So that’ll be a new phone then. Sigh.
Now back to the laptops. Well, the home one is a pain but that would have to be replaced at some point in the next few months anyway. And, I hear you say, well, the work one is your Companies problem. They can just replace it, right?
Well, yes. They can give me a new hard drive. But those of you who might be IT focussed are holding their head in their hands and shaking it sadly.
I last backed up the computer at the end of 2011.
That’s almost two years of data that now is inaccessible (well, unless you want to pay a fortune to a specialist).
I am a little cross with myself.
Now it is not a huge disaster. An awful lot of what is important to me has been sent to others and can be got back from them, or I can get out of my sent folder. My blog fiction is gone, but it is all still on the blog… So I can rescue that too. One story that was just being prepared will never be told in the original form; I have to persuade myself to have the enthusiasm to rewrite it.
But if I had backed up properly, this would have been a hundred times less painful and catching back up a lot easier.
I wonder if as you read this, a little voice is asking politely (or not, I have no idea how the voices in your head work, but let’s assume they are polite) when you last backed up your own data… I suspect it is not recently.
So let me encourage you to do it. Do it now.
And if you don’t have a back up, what are you thinking? Get someone to buy you an external hard disk at Christmas and celebrate protecting your work with a mince pie and a small sherry this holiday season.
Trust me. Unlike the Doctor I cannot mess around with the Space/Time Continuum and prevent disaster.
You can.