A friendly reminder to back up your documents

Friday night, I settled in for a bit of television watching while I compiled the week's menus and grocery list. My laptop, which got me through law school and the Bar, made some funny clicking sounds and then said that it didn't have a hard drive. Now, when I was in law school, I backed up all of my documents pretty regularly. However, since graduating and starting work, I haven't done that. It didn't really occur to me that I had anything important saved just on my laptop...until my laptop said it didn't have a hard drive. That's when I realized that the ONLY copies of my menu spreadsheet and grocery list document were on my laptop. I nearly had a panic attack. I have probably spent close to 30 hours compiling all of that stuff. To give you an idea, I had menus planned out for almost a year's worth of dinners and my shopping list, which lists every ingredient of every menu, was 91 pages long. I've been doing this for a good 8 months. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what was planned. I didn't know how I was going to put together a grocery list. All that hard work just lost...

Thankfully, the computer gods smiled on me and I was finally about to get my laptop running again. Everything is now backed up on several computers. And I made it to the grocery store.