My Poor Dead Computer
Yesterday the hard drive on my computer passed into the electronic afterlife. Don’t know what happened, but I know it’s dead. Even though I enjoy the technology and messing with new stuff, one thing that I really dislike is setting up a new computer. My old browser was set up just how I liked it, my desktop shortcuts were only the ones I wanted… I had a workflow. I knew what I would find when I booted up every day.
So I lost some documents, a database I was working on and a few spreadsheets. So be it. It’s my own stupid fault for not backing those things up. I preach that to teachers but I know and readily admit that I have a very haphazard approach when it comes to computing. This is not the first time that I’ve lost stuff and I know it won’t be the last. As most of us know… it’s not “if” your computer will break, it’s “when”.
So now I’m preparing to regroup and recreate some of the items that I lost. What I’ve begun to notice though is that it’s not all that hard. When most of the things you do happen online in the “cloud” the idea of a computer breaking down is not all that daunting. The one thing that I will recommend is to back up your browser. I use Firefox almost exclusively (although I’m dabbling in Chrome) and there’s this nifty little backup tool called MozBackup that I’ve used for about 4 years now. What’s great about it is that once I have one Firefox installation the way I want it I can just run it on all the computers that I frequently use and have my environment back. I haven’t used Foxmarks yet but I understand that it works well and would take care of part of my issue with syncing bookmarks across computers. If you are a Firefox user and you do as much work online as I do, I suggest backing up your data and your browser settings as well. Hopefully you won’t have a computer crash soon. For me, it’s back to re-establishing my workflow and getting up and running.
