Lesson learned

So I was skipping along merrily in my pre-holiday bliss last month. It was shaping up to be a great holiday...personal stuff had blown over, the businesses were taking shape, friends were friendly, neighbors were neighborly.

Heck, even the cocoa was tasting.... more cocoa-y.

Then, upon my return from a football game on Dec 23, I walked in the office to check email and there sat my laptop displaying the "blue screen of death".

After a re-boot, it was apparent that it was gone. Because it was the holidays, no shop was open to look at it, and in the meantime, I knew that there were lots of people trying to contact me regarding some projects, the holidays, etc.

It wasn't until Jan 4 that I was able to fully restore my data on another computer. A quick tally of the actual costs I incurred:

• $949 for new laptop
• $199 for new Quickbooks software
• $49 for new Quicken software
• $25 for adapter for connect my old laptop hard disk to the new computer
• $79 for new mouse (Vista is not compatible with a lot of old hardware and generally pretty awful.)

The money can be recuperated over time, but the time cannot. I estimate that I spent over 70 hours over the holidays on setting up the new computer, restoring the old files, and updating software where needed.

It's been a LONG time since I've faced losing ALL of my data. Admittedly, I had gotten complacent. I hadn't backed-up files in a long time and EVERYTHING was on that laptop--work files, legal documents, photos, addresses, email, logos, and all the rest.

So when I picked up the new laptop, I also picked up a new item which I should have bought years prior-- an external storage drive. And I've set all of my accounting software to automatically backup once a month. My most important documents now reside on discs tucked away in my safe.

Call it a lesson learned in how to prevent wasting another holiday in computer limbo.