External hard disk enclosure from behind. On t...

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I was quietly sitting at my desk, finishing another 11 hour day; the life of an entrepreneur is not the eloquent dream that one envisions; when “HOLY CRAP!” I had blown the hard drive on my desktop computer, the second in 7 years and as is my usual fashion I had not backed up everything. I can talk the talk but I do not always follow my own advice. Lucky for me I had the important files backed up, but…

Just as the dark clouds of gloom began to totally, envelop me in its shroud a bright beam of light began to penetrate the darkness and as I blindly looked into the light, I realized that there was a God. There looking up at me was my laptop and my two external drives. Saved, or so I thought, with a half-hearted grin, I still did not have the total control I was enjoying just mere minutes before. Still, I could at least continue to do my work, or so I thought once again. That was 22 hours ago…

My half-baked euphoria was short-lived as I felt an ominous presence hovering over me, slowly I turned and there he was, “MURPHY’S LAW” and true to form the beam of hope faded…

First one external drive started to flounder as I frantically tried to find and sort my badly needed files. After what seemed an eternity I managed to get the situation under control, YES. However, MURPHY had other plans. He decided to tamper with the 2nd external drive. “God have mercy”, I thought to myself, “What have I done to deserve this…” Oh, yes, now I remembered what it was, I had decided to become self-employed.

I could feel the stress level climb as I reached for my trusty nine-(9) iron, perhaps a little indoor golf was the answer.

Hmm, perhaps a hole in one with the desktop as the ball and the laptop to follow would appease the God’s. Man beats crap out of computer with golf club, news at 11:00.

“My photographic images I had worked so hard to obtain”, I silently screamed,” My power point presentation I spent hours creating”. Okay grab a coffee and use the club on MURPHY…

I did not lose my cool, as I normally would, smoke a pack or two of cigarettes, as I would have in the past; I quit two years ago; rather I sipped my coffee, stared out the window at the wooded view, (my office/front room window overlooks a park) and fumed.

Slowly I envisioned myself becoming destitute because of my present demise, thinking to myself, “Brother can you spare me a dime”, but MURPHY is broke… Ah, the life of an entrepreneur, initially broke, long hours of work and often no thanks… Is it worth it I reflected – you bet it is because tomorrow I will ignore the computer, grab my camera gear, and shoot some stock images? I am the master of my own destiny; after all, nothing can go wrong there, right…?

The moral of this story:

For individuals and business alike, always ensure you have a back up of your files. If you can have two separate backups even better as when I went to load the first backup it started to falter while accessing the files. It did eventually work, but…

I try to do my backups daily, and in this case, I did not follow my rule of thumb and lost some valuable data. I was lucky in that I had a paper draft of my project I was working on and had only put about two hours into the actual presentation. Still, time lost, not to mention the graphic template I had designed to accompany it, every other project I have worked on prior was safe.

View from my home office. View from my home office.


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Allan Herman, Creative Visual Marketing Services Inc. (CVM Inc.)

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