Ever have your computer die on you?  I remember when it happened to me.  It was about two years ago, and I was surfing the net one evening when suddenly my computer shut off.  I thought we had lost power or something, but my TV was still on.  I tried pushing the power button to turn it back on, but nothing happened.  Suddenly, my heart kind of sank.  Did I just lose all my data?  I had been collecting songs and stuff on my computer for the last 8 years.  Did I seriously just lose all of them?

I had an external hard drive that I did backups on, but I didn’t do them very often.  In fact, I probably did one once every few months, and all of the songs and stuff that I had gotten in the last few months hadn’t been copied over yet.

And what about all the work I had saved on my computer?  I did have some work stuff on it, too, although my initial concern was my music.

Fortunately, it turned out that my hard drive was just fine and I didn’t lose any data.  My motherboard had died which is what caused the computer to shut off.  My computer was a good 5 or 6 years old at this point, so it’s not too out of the ordinary for something like this to happen.  Unfortunately, it was a proprietary motherboard for a computer that was no longer made, so my only option was to buy a new computer.

I was able to remove my old hard drive and connect it to my new computer with an adapter so I could copy over all my files and documents and everything, so I didn’t lose any data.  But I sure was freaked out.  It caused me to start having better backup habits.  I now have an external hard drive that I back up any time I get new files, and I also use cloud storage from Mozy to keep my important files online so I can access them from anywhere.  I seriously don’t want to take any chances with losing data again.  It’s fine if a computer dies.  I mean, you have to replace it which can be kind of expensive, but there’s a lot of data that can be priceless because it can’t be replaced.

It’s also possible for your hard drive to fail.  I got lucky in that it was my mobo that failed.  At least I didn’t lose any files.  I don’t know what I would’ve done if it was my hard drive that crashed.