Lev Lazinskiy

Always, Always, Always Make Backups

This weekend was the most frustrating weekend of my life. Something so terrible happened that I am unable to find the words to express my deep sadness and pure frustration.

The events that occurred are the equivalence of having a huge fire burn down the house you grew up in and destroying everything that you ever loved.

You see, I bought a Macbook Pro two years ago. I loved my Macbook Pro, and I trusted it. In my naive and arrogant mind I never once bothered to do a backup. I sometimes thought about it, even went to go browse a couple of external hard drives, but I never committed to buying one.

Then Saturday afternoon, I opened up my computer and it was frozen, Ok - no problem. I rebooted and nothing happens. I hear a clicking sound coming from the front right corner of the computer. Clicking sounds are never a good thing. The apple logo shows but nothing ever happens. Nothing.. then a no smoking sign without a cigarette shows up and that is when I knew that it was over.

EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, that I have worked on for the last 7 years is on that computer. Every picture I have ever taken, thousands of songs, all of the things that I have ever written. I mean honestly my entire digital life is lost. I feel empty, I feel like I am in a coma - - or have amnesia, lost.

The hard drive is gone – I went to the apple store and they put a new one in , but they were unable to recover any of the lost data.

In a way, it is kind of liberating - I can finally move forward with my life and starting today I will begin a new collection of videos, songs, pictures, and writing. But a piece of me will be gone forever - and I will miss it.

Lesson of the day - Always back up your files. ALWAYS.

Lesson Number 2: Apple is a great company that makes great products, but at the end of the day a computer is a computer, it is susceptible to failure, and if we put all of our trust into it - then technology will be the downfall of mankind.