This week, I had a laptop meltdown.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my Sony Vaio. Yes, it has a few scratches and dents, and some keys are a little sticky due to my terrible work-chocolate interface habit, and the bottom left of the mousepad has worn away due to constant clicking – but on the whole it’s been a friend, this one. It comes on all my travels with me, nestled in my hand luggage, with its slightly-too-heavy casing giving me a sense of security.
And then I loaded a couple of CDs at the weekend and that was apparently a step too far. It froze.
Now it may have been my choice in music (thanks, Alabama 3!), but I do expect my devices to last longer than the two years or so I’ve had this one. Of course I lust after new technology, and the thought of splashing out on a cheeky little Lenova Yoga often tickles my brain after a hard day at the Vaioface, but until a device literally either falls apart or falls off the table and smashes, I’m a fairly constant devotee of the one I use daily. I don’t flirt with Kindles or iPads – me and my lappy are BFFs.
However. Having taken my laptop to the rather friendly and efficient computer repair shop (which is rather conveniently at the end of my road) to be wiped so I could start over with it, I realised just how much was on it. In fact, I can tell you. There were 21,439 files on that machine. Even assuming a load of those were pics, the occasional video, and the magic files that make laptops do what laptops do – that’s a lot of words.
If you work almost exclusively online as I do, communicating mostly via email or chat and with a heavy output of publication, you may like to pause to wonder just how many words you write every day. I paused to wonder and my head nearly exploded. No wonder that left click on the mousepad has worn away. I’m amazed my fingertips haven’t worn away.
But I do have some good news that I’d like to share – I had Cloud backup. I’ve paid for Cloud backup annually for around three years – a trickle of around £40 that poof goes out of my account and which I’ve never really thought about before (more expensive plans are available if you require HIPAA compliancy, from my personal choice of Carbonite). I had no reason to think about it – I just vaguely knew that once a day some sort of magic stuff happened in my favour.
Until my laptop had a breakdown and I nearly lost 21,439 files.
How many times are we told to back-up, back-up, back-up? How many of us do?
Now the nice people at Cloudwards haave created an interactive comparison chart where users can find the best fitting Cloud Backup solutions for their needs: https://www.cloudwards.net/
Also, check out this comparison of pCloud v MEGA: https://www.cloudwards.net/
So please do learn from my experience and get around to taking advantage of that lovely nebulous Cloud that we hear so much about for back-up – I’ve felt the pain so you don’t have to. Now I get to leave all those files up there and start over with a clean hard drive, and my BFF is safely back in my hand luggage for now.
🙂
Kate