I guess I had it coming.  I’ve been in computing for 26 years.  The first time I’ve had a personal hard drive fail was Sunday.  I have to consider myself truly lucky.  I lost mostly family digital photos.  My last backup of the family photos was about 18 months ago, burned to CD, so there are some biggies on there, including my 15th Wedding Anniversary in Jamaica and a recent trip to India where I saw family members that I hadn’t seen in a decade.

I was out Monday with a stomach flu.

Yesterday morning, when I turned on my work PC, my hard drive failed.  That’s two dead drives in three days.

Want to know the irony?  My India photos were backed up on the work PC’s hard drive.

So I’m on a borrowed laptop while my trusty old Dell laptop, a hand-me-down from my former manager and long out of warranty, but still running like a champ, gets fixed up.

I think I’ll miss my archive of email the most.  I backed up most everything else, but it is hard to back up a file that is 5GB in size and always locked by Outlook.  Now, if I could get Outlook to automatically make multiple archive files, instead of just one, each one maxed out at the size appropriate for burning to my local CD drive, then it would have been dead easy to have been making backups all along.

I think I’ll suggest that to the Office team.  Maybe that feature will show up.

In a couple of years 🙂