In which the computer gods were looking out for me

We have a computer at home. It's green. I love it.

But I never back it up.

We have an external hard drive at home. It's twice the size of the hard drive on the computer.

But I never back the computer up.

We take lots of pictures. Every few months I think, "Gee, it would suck if we lost our pictures." And then I copy them to the external drive.

But I never back the computer up.

And then I read something, somewhere. I can't remember what it was or where or when, but the gist was that whoever wrote it (or it was written about) had a fire or something at their house. And lost everything. Including all of their photos. I thought it might be a good idea to get a second hard drive to keep at work, so if something happened, we'd still have those pictures.

So, for reasons still unknown to me, on Friday night I stopped on the way home and bought a second external hard drive (HD2).

And on Friday night I copied all of the pictures on the hard drive of the computer onto the first hard drive (HD1). Then I copied the photographic content of HD1 onto HD2. I don't know how long it took. I started it at 10:00 pm and when I woke up the computer had gone to sleep around 4:30, so the copying had stopped, but it wasn't done yet. So I finished it.

Then I decided to run a back up to HD1. It took 16 hours. I was going to do a second back up to HD2, but ugh...16 hours. I decided I'd do it later.

I'm glad that I got it backed up to HD1 because, well, on Sunday afternoon, I turned the computer on to get a recipe for dinner and it didn't do anything. Last night it still wasn't happy - it loads the desktop icons and then it freezes.

I guess the computer needs the doctor...and maybe we need a new computer. But at least I was smart enough to do a back up.

And HD2 has moved into my office to stay until it's time to do another back up.

Which I will be doing often.