The nightmare of geek nightmares happened last week. I came home and had a Blue Screen of Death on my laptop. My hard drive had fried, irreparably.

Of course I freaked out. Me, without internet access? In the midst of the holiday season? Right when I was due to update my website with 4 new products? AAARRGGHHHH!

In the end I was able to resurrect my old desktop from it's buggy, barely-running state, and use that as a temporary solution until Dell could express a new hard drive to me. And it looks like I had most of my important files and data successfully saved onto my backup server.

The only thing that is sorely missing from the backup is my Outlook folder with all emails and attachments from the past, oh...8 months or so. That is bad. Very bad. All of my customer and vendor communications, addresses, phone numbers, emails to and from friends, deep thoughts, etc. PLUS all the faxes that I had just sent while in Southern CA dealing with my grandfather's death and grandmother's Alzheimer's or dementia or whatever it is that makes her not remember things from one moment to the next. Funeral paperwork, all that...gone.

I removed my Outlook files from the backup schedule because I always have Outlook open, and it can't back the file up when Outlook is open. And silly me, I never thought to close down Outlook every once in a while and back things up manually. So now I'm screwed. But not nearly as bad as I could be.

Well, I learned my lesson. Back up, back up, back up. EVERYTHING.