My precious, precious...

This was not a kindly week. The Motorcycle show was opening at CAM, I was trying to organize my entries for the next show and my hard drive crashed.

Yes, my hard drive died.

I know, with today's technology you just never think about a hard drive crashing. I mean the things last forever and crank up whenever you turn on the computer so why think about them? I had plenty of warnings now that I look back in perfect twenty-twenty hindsight. A coupla months ago I got a rattle at startup. That should have been enough. Then it became a whir, like a World War I fighter idling in the misty dawn before a long flight over the trenches. Then it died.

I mean it died. There was no last, final, penultimate warning, I was loading a CD and started having trouble with Windows Media Player and then Black Screen. Right, not even a nice Blue Screen of death, the thing shut down. I fought it for the rest of the day, but I couldn't get it to run long enough to do a diagnostic. So I asked for an extra serving of crow and took it to the nice folks at Comp-U-Talk. The Computer Ace shot down and left smoking...

Now why would I bother you with this drivel in a blog about art? Because like it or not most of us in the art world have at least some of our most precious stuff on the computer, if it crashes, world of hurt time. I want to make sure you don't have that nightmare moment like I did last week when suddenly you are looking at a dark screen and wondering just when you did your last backup.

You are doing backups?

I know one more thing to have to remember, but you do have to do it. I found myself, sweating for three long days wondering how much I would lose if they couldn't get it back up and running because you see, I did my last backup ninety days ago. Yep shame on me. Woe is me. And smack up side of head with a heavy object I should have been doing it every week!

You see I forgot the prime directive, backup anything you want to see ever again.

I was lucky, Hogwarts' Computer Repair and Software Alchemy, managed to get the beast to run, transfer my data and install and newer and MUCH BIGGER hard drive. So I dodged the bullet. But it could have been bad.

Why wasn't I doing backups? The same ole reason, too busy, too distracted, too stupid. I let the motorcycle show take up all of my time. I said if I can just keep getting the blog posted and the art site built and the show running on schedule I can catch up when the opening is over. Sounds like I am an essential cog in the CAM wheel doesn't it? I ain't, I'm not even a necessary cog, I might even be incognito, that's how important I am.

And I let it eat up all of my time and I didn't do what I needed to do. Then my hard drive crashed.

Come to Jesus meeting! I got religion, almost too late, but still I got it.

So now I'm gonna preach to you. And if you got enough from your pastor over the weekend, now's the time to slip out the back.

You have to back up your files. And now it is easier than turning on a light switch. Okay maybe it isn’t but it is pretty close.

If you have a lot of precious files or if your old computer is running out of space there’s a nifty little thing called an external hard drive. I like the Western Digital Passport 500GB. It is small enough to slip into a pocket and large enough to store all of your video files. That’s right the video clip you downloaded from You Tube of Sonny and Cher singing “I’ve Got You babe.” And it is USB 2.0 and 3.0 in the same package. Makes you ready now and ready for the next generation.

The Passport is USB so it plugs in, loads the necessary drivers and is ready to go in less than a minute. Now here’s the only catch, it wants to install its own software. If you hate backing up and just won’t do it, it’s a good thing. If you have half a brain and really want to know what’s going on in your hard drive, don’t. The software is good and will do the job, but I like to think with something as easy as USB technology you can do it all by yourself.

So decline to install. That’s it. You are done and every time you connect the drive it will load all by itself. It shows up as a separate hard drive, on my machine it would be E, but just click on My Computer and have a look and you’ll find it. When you do use it just like you would any other drive. Drag and Drop any file you want to save. It will copy it to the Passport and leave the original drive alone.

And if you are one of those guys who have loaded up your drive with all sorts of things, copy to the Passport and delete it from your internal hard drive. And when you unplug it and put it away in a drawer it will be there when you come back. Anytime you need to backup a file just Drag and Drop to the Passport. It will overwrite the previous file including any new material with what you had there to begin with, now you don’t need no stinking backup to do that, do you?

There’s a lot of bad stuff out there, virus, Trojans, worms, pilot error and drive failure, don’t get caught like I did and spend half a week sweating it out, Get a back up drive and cruse the Net with nary a care.