a dead laptop...I knew I did backups for a reason!

So I'm in a motel room during a trip to ShopBot and working on a some programming projects on my laptop, when suddenly there's a pop from the speakers, a brief flash on the screen, and then nothing. It's like someone turned off the power button. I turned it back on, all the indicator lights came on for a second, and then blinked off again. This isn't good! Like Pavlov's dog I keep pushing the button every couple of seconds and wait for my reward, but it never comes...it's really dead! A call to Dell support the next day, a couple of diagnostic tests, and my suspicions were confirmed..it's a dead motherboard. It's too late to get a new one out that evening and then it's the weekend, so it'll be Monday before the new motherboard shows up.

The good news is that it wasn't a dead harddrive, though I had just done a backup on the Friday before so would have only lost the couple of days of work I'd done while on the road. It really drove home the need for good backups, though.

I don't have a very efficient system for backing up but the method I use works for me. I know you're supposed to have a schedule of full and incremental backups, with rotating media to store the backups, but I'm just not that organized. I use a program called Second Copy and back up to an external hard drive every week or so (when I remember to). I also manually copy over my "REALLY currently working on" folder on my desktop to a USB thunb drive pretty regularly during the week, since that's the folder that holds the work that would require the most thought to re-create. It's not a perfect system but it's better than my old one...doing nothing and praying that nothing bad happened!

So tomorrow I should get the new motherboard and will hopefully be back up and running by tomorrow night. I'm thinking that this might be a good time for a full "format and re-install" to start out the New Year with a clean slate, but what a pain! We'll see.