Computer Addendum

You need to have an external hard drive for your computer, no matter how dedicated a Luddite you might be. I 'lost' two hard drives within six months last year, and Jim's laptop died. I was still working at being an artist, and having to keep records and all that other stuff I was talking about yesterday, so it was a big deal each time. And Jim has lots of files for his volunteer activities which affect a lot of people. Even if you aren't working from your computer you've got photos and research and files about your kids and business stuff of some kind. You know you do.

Thanks to an insurance-minded up bringing and a reminder from my cousin Barb I got external drives for both of us a couple of years ago. And we have 4 computers for the 2 of us so I wasn't completely stuck. It took a couple of hours for the recovery to load on my new PC's, but it was mostly all there. Mostly, because my automatic back-up is set for Sundays and the last hard drive literally exploded on a Friday, naturally, so there were 5 missing days. Not that bad a deal.

So get yourself to Staples, Costco, London Drugs, Future Shop, Walmart, and buy a 300-500GB external storage device. Plug it into your computer, set the back-up to run automatically, and exhale. It'll cost you about $60.00 and a few minutes of time. About once a year check the storage and delete the oldest couple of full images of your computer. (How it works is that it takes a full picture of your hard drive every once in a while and in between times it updates only what you've been working with. If you need to find something specific that you've deleted but you haven't had to restore your whole system you sort of have to remember when it was.)

I can feel you glazing over! Just buy the hard drive, PLUG IT IN, and hope you never need it. It will just sit there and mind its own business while looking after yours. WD, Western Digital, is a decent brand.