The Post I Wasn’t Going To Write

Reflections

I had decided not to write a post about New Years resolutions.  I am not one of the seemingly few people who can use the new calendar year to determine to become a better person, then persevere through whatever life may throw at them to bring about those positive changes. If you are that type of person I have great admiration for you, but I simply don’t make New Years resolutions.

I have also read many good blog posts about making resolutions, keeping resolutions, or setting goals for the year rather than making resolutions. I didn’t think there was anything left for me to say on the topic.

It seems, as is often the case when I decide that I’m not going to do something (in this case make a resolution) God has other plans. He occasionally likes to remind me that He is control of my life, so when I say “I’m not going to…” He slaps me upside the head and says “You better…”

My most recent slap upside the head came on Wednesday/Thursday of this past week. When I turned on my computer Wednesday morning it was doing an automatic update “installing update 1 of 3” it said. So I waited and waited and waited while it went through the process including shutting down at one point and restarting and finally it said that the updates were installed. At this point when I attempted to use my computer all I got was a message that said “the system is not responding”. After clicking around a bit attempting to bring my computer back to life and only seeing the same message I told my husband of my dilemma.

My husband sat down at my computer and knowing a bit more about computers than I do he was able to get into a screen that had restore options on it. He attempted a couple of different options but had no success. He then asked if I had my documents and pictures backed up so I wouldn’t lose them if he ran a full system restore. All of my pictures were still on memory cards so they would be safe, but I had not developed the habit of backing up my documents. Most of what I had stored were product labels and I had hard copies so I would be able to recreate anything I lost. While I told him it was ok to attempt the full system restore, he decided instead to take it to a repair shop to see if they could repair it and save my work.

It wasn’t until midday on Thursday that he received a call from the repair shop. They would be able to get my computer running again. It would cost around $120 and would be done by the end of the day. They would also be able to recover my documents – that would cost an additional $100 and would take an extra day or two.

I had already resigned myself to the fact that I would have to remake all of my documents. Admittedly it was my own fault for not backing them up in an alternative location, so I was not willing to spend the extra $100 to have them recovered.

This is not the first time that I have heard of this happening, in fact in the last couple months I have read more than one blog (horror) story of people’s hard work being lost forever when their computer crashes and they had neglected to back up their work. I, unfortunately, did not heed their warning. I will now spend many hours recreating documents, but as I do I have made a resolution to back up each item I make.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/resolution

resolution

noun

  • 1A firm decision to do or not to do something.

     

My reason for writing this, however, was not to announce my New Years resolution, but to remind you of the importance of backing up your photos and documents. If you are not already in the habit of doing so, I highly recommend that you begin, lest you too get slapped upside the head.

19 thoughts on “The Post I Wasn’t Going To Write”

  2. I let out a laugh when I read how God says “you better…”. Yes, backing up is super important. I actually keep all my photos on a hard drive that I store in a fire proof safe. My family and my memories are the most important things to me. That being said, I probably should back up my documents more that I do… but we usually keep everything on our Google Drive. That way, if something does happen to our computer, we can still access all of our important files on another one, or even on our phones in a pinch.

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  3. I feel your frustrations. I lost a huge chunk of my elder daughter’s photos from her 6 months old to 18 months. Never get to recover them coz I never back up.

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    1. I have started copying and pasting my documents onto a thumb drive so even if this computer crashes I can access my documents on another. I am sure it will be worth the extra few seconds it takes to do this. My pictures are still stored on a memory card from my camera so they are backed up as well.

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  4. Great resolution. I go through a cycle of either having a close call or reading about it, backing up my data religiously for a while … and then stopping the habit. I should pick it up again! Thanks for the reminder.

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    1. Thank you Becky. I’m glad you were able to recover your documents. Sometimes it is not even possible to recover them and sometimes the loss can be great. Best just to play it safe and back it up.
      Thank for following my site.

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  7. So sorry to hear about your computer.. I had the same problem 3 years ago with my ipad. Elis played with it and threw it in our aquarium. It was only a few seconds a left my eyes on her because I was printing some important papers. When I saw it, I immediately removed it and tried to save.. sadly it didn’t work anymore.. and yes I lost all the photos because I failed to back them up.. I was really upset with her but couldn’t blame her because she’s only a toddler, partly it was my fault.. I should leave it to her and I didn’t back up the photos.. From then on I learnt backing up my photos or files..

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      1. Oh and one thing I lost was the wedding vow I wrote for our wedding.. I wrote it on a piece of paper too and on the ipad.. but I couldn’t find the piece of paper anymore.. and the ipad was hopeless for me to retrieve anything back..

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      2. Do you have a video recording of your wedding? You could perhaps rewrite it by watching that. We have that and I also have a printed copy of our wedding vows tucked away in a drawer.

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      3. We have Ruth, that’s probably the only way I would ever recall it.. I remember a few bits but I’m not so good in memorizing so I forgot the whole thing..

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