I Lost Everything in the Crash of 2007

That sickening feeling when you press every button and the computer taunts you with a feeble beep. It's the realization of that unspeakable dream about taking a final exam for which you haven't studied and furthermore you thought you'd withdrawn from the class long before the deadline, yet there you are -- hanging out to dry, twisting in the wind.

And you experience the five stages of grief:

1. No! No, this can't be happening! Where's all my stuff?!
   
2. Pleaseohpleasephplease make this fix itself and I vow promise swear I'll back up every fifteen minutes for the rest of my life
3. I hate you, you stupid computer! Hate you hate you hate you!!! Bam bam bam!!
4. Oy. I can't take this. I have to go to bed for a week. All my financial records have spontaneously combusted so I'm going to Leavenworth.
   
5. Maybe there's still something hiding in the hard drive.

So thank goodness for the Geek Squad, who in less than a week managed to retrieve all my lost information and return it to me unharmed, albeit hungry, dirty and frightened, in a nifty external hard drive: my belt. They also recommended I pick up suspenders: a tiny thumb drive about the size of my, uh, thumb.

But then the Geeks strongly insisted -- I mean suggested -- in their inimitable geeky way, that I also back up online because, well you never know if the Midwestern version of Katrina will come along and wipe everything out and then where would I be.

So I signed up with IBackup for a five gigabyte backup, which I hope will be enough, and I executed my first backup last night, and guess how long it took?

An hour? No -- more
Two hours? -- nope
Five hours? -- uh uh

Well, you can stop guessing because I can't even answer the question, since it's been backing up for, let's see now, 21 hours and 39 minutes and it still has 11% to go.

This seems to be the Energizer Bunny of online backups.


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