Like most students who rely on their computer, a random crash can hurt severely

The beginning of last month was unlike any other this year: it was the month that gave me the most stress. This stress wasn’t attributed to an increase in course work, job responsibility, or problems in my personal life. All the stress and grey hairs I received last month were due to the fact that my computer - for a short period of time - was reduced to an expensive paperweight.

Like many of you reading this, my laptop is where I do most, if not all my, school work. It contains all my school files from this year and years past, as well as important pictures and software.

As I mentioned earlier, my computer became an expensive paperweight because, for whatever reason, it decided to succumb to full-blown hard drive failure. Luckily for me, I had made a full backup of my computer files incase this event happened, and I was able to recover all the data that was lost after replacing the hard drive. My luck, however, ran out just one day later when the new hard-drive, which was replaced by the folks over at the Apple store, also crashed.

After picking myself off the floor from the heart attack I’m sure I suffered - my memory of the event is slightly hazy - I made the appropriate arrangements to have the ‘geniuses’ over at the Apple store actually fix the problem.

When I brought my computer in the second time, I was delivered a harrowing blow; I got ‘that’s weirded.’ For those who are unaware of what it actually means to get ‘that’s weirded,’ it’s when a person who is an expert on a specific subject (most often in an IT setting) sees your problem and says ‘that’s weird,’ implying that the problem you have isn’t something they are familiar with, and it shouldn’t be happening

I had to leave my computer at the Apple store to get diagnosed and fixed. A day later I was able to pick it up. Upon pick up, I was delivered some good and bad news.

The good news was that my computer was fixed. There was a problem with the cable, which attaches the hard drive to the logic board, causing neither to act appropriately and creating hard drive failure and data loss.

The bad news was they were not able to recover all the data that was lost this time. I lost all the data from the beginning of October to the time of the second hard drive failure. Essentially, I had lost a lot of important information; I even lost all the work I did for one of my finals.

I know there are many of you out there who have full faith in the auto-recovery Gods, and there are even those out there who won’t consider an external hard-drive due to their expensive nature.

Portable external hard-drives are getting cheaper every year, and onboard software in the operating system requires nothing more than simply connecting the hard-drive to your computer for the backups to start.

Although you might think this will never happen to you, but can you really run the risk of losing all your pictures and important files? Backing up your computer could save you from unnecessary stress and grey hairs.