I like to think of myself as reasonably tech savvy. I’ve managed to troubleshoot many of my own problems in the past and act as a form of on-call tech support for my parents. However, my fatal flaw pertaining to the maintenance of my own devices is that I’m incorrigibly lazy. My desktop and My Documents folder are cluttered with files waiting to be sorted and I’ve been putting off organizing my iPhoto events and albums for months. By far my worst offence to date is that up until recently, I had absolutely no backups of any of my files. Most people who know anything about computers would probably be shaking their heads at me already. Yes, I know. Unfortunately for me, it took almost losing everything that I have stored on my laptop to teach me that I needed to get an external hard drive. 
It was a typical Friday night. I had come home from school and opened my laptop, which I had been using that day. It wouldn’t let me enter my password so I figured that it was just frozen. I forced shutdown and waited a few minutes before rebooting. When my precious Macbook Pro restarted, my screen was blank, save a small flashing of a file folder with a question mark in the middle. I immediately knew that this was probably a serious problem and turned straight to Google for help troubleshooting. I went through several recovery processes to no avail. By then, I was really starting to worry.
I called Apple Support shortly after and explained the situation and what I had done to try to remedy the situation myself. I was told that I likely had an issue with my hard drive and got help to set up an appointment at the Apple Store so that my computer could be properly inspected. The next day, I repeated my entire story to a guy at the Genius Bar who told me that I would probably had a software issue and would have to wipe my hard drive and reset the whole computer. As disappointed as I was that I would be losing innumerable documents, songs and irreplaceable pictures, I knew that I had to do it. To both of our surprise, when he pulled up the menu to reset the laptop, my hard drive could not be found. That’s when I knew that I might be dealing with a bigger issue.
There were two possible problems; either my hard drive was fried or the cable connecting the hard drive to the rest of the computer was broken. I certainly hoped it was the latter because that would mean that I would lose nothing. With no other real options, I checked my laptop in for maintenance and prayed for a happy ending. And I got it. I lost absolutely nothing and everything went back to normal.
I had learned my lesson. That evening, I went out and bought myself an external hard drive and backed up my computer for the first time ever. There’s no chance that I’ll ever let myself risk losing so much important data ever again. So allow my story to be a cautionary tale and please please please please please back up your computers, whether you keep copies of important files using a Cloud storage system, USBs or an external hard drive. Don’t do the lazy thing because that only ever leads to trouble in the long run.
