The Importance of Backing Up

A couple of days ago I had a bit of a scare.  My iMac didn't come out of sleep mode properly so I did a hard reboot.  Now I was used to doing this type of thing with my old Windows based PC and occasionally on my husband's Windows based laptop but not on my iMac.  The beauty of my iMac is how well behaved it is.  Actual computer crashes are not the norm by any stretch of the imagination.  Let me tell you at 6 AM without coffee in my system it was not a pleasant way to greet the day.  While the computer was coming back up I made a coffee then settled back down at the desk to get a bit of serious blogging done but that didn't quite happen.

I keep pictures edited for my blogs on my Lacie external hard drive.  Quite often I will edit several pictures to be used as needed.  I opened up Finder and discovered that Lacie hadn't mounted so I turned it off, disconnected the USB and tried again.  For some reason my iMac was not recognizing my Lacie meaning I had no access to my edited pictures.  Panic turned to practicality.  It was too early to call my kids, the Mac experts so I went to Lacie support.  From there I started troubleshooting including opening up the Lacie to be sure everything inside was still connected.  Despite everything I did, my iMac still wouldn't recognize the Lacie.  When the next piece of advice was to format the Lacie I stopped dead track.  So I powered up my husband's laptop and plugged in the Lacie.  It worked like a charm!  I grabbed a flash drive to get the pictures I needed to use then set the problem of the Lacie aside until I could talk to the kids.

Later that day my husband bought me an 8 G memory stick as a back-up.  He copied all of my blog backup files to the memory stick.  At the same time he found one folder that appeared to be corrupted so we made the executive decision to delete the entire folder from the Lacie.  I plugged in the memory stick and was good to go.  The kids called after they put the kids to bed.  I told them I had a solution so it could wait until they were down next.  One of them suggested plugging the Lacie into another USB port.  All of a sudden the Lacie was alive with full access!  Testing the USB port that it was on showed no problems so I'm still not sure what caused the problem.  At any rate and needless to say, I now have additional back-ups of my blog files on the memory stick and my husband's laptop in addition to the Lacie.  Sometimes a little scare is a good thing.

Garden Gnome
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