A while back, a post was written mentioning the ever-present danger of crashing a hard driving and losing all of your most precious files. In the past week or so, I have noticed that my computer has decided it would rather think for itself than do what I command. Actually, it is showing signs of a failing hard drive (or alzheimer’s) on a daily basis.

Let me just lay down some of the symptoms for you: sometimes I am just browsing the internet and it gives me a little write error bubble (I didn’t know I was writing anything), it takes about 10 minutes to actually start up, it takes forever to run any programs (about the only thing it can do with relative ease is internet browsing), and it seems to have misplaced the procedure for shutting down since every time I try that it “begins dump of physical memory” thus launching into an infinite circle of restarting, running a disk check, getting an error, dumping physical memory, and et cetera, finally I will return home some days and find my computer already in this infiinite loop of restarting and I wonder how long it has been thrashing itself. Long story short, it is dying, and it is only a matter of time.

Anyhow, after my computer starting having these problems on a daily basis (probably shouldn’t have waited that long), I went out and bought an external hard drive to back up my data. For me, the most important thing to keep intact were my pictures, the rest was for the most part replaceable (or I didn’t really care about losing it, like papers). If I had been planning ahead, I would have shopped around, found the best deal for my needs and made an informed purchase. However, since I waited until the brink of disaster, I needed something urgently, and I drove down to the ol

Best Buy. My laptop only has a 60 GB hard drive, so I didn’t need anything incredibly spacious, and I wanted to spend as little money as possible.

I settled on this nice little Western Digital Passport (80 GB version) which set me back a cool $80. It comes with some pretty nifty software that allows you to sync the files of your choosing with the hard drive. Whenever you sync it, it checks in the folders you have indicated to see if anything has changed and makes the appropriate updates. Also, if you take it and use it on another computer, you can sync whatever changes you have made back onto the original computer. I must admit, it was quite frustrating to get it set up the frst time, but I blame my problems on the growing inadequacies of my computer. Oh, and it is quite small, you could carry it around in your pocket, also apparently quite durable from what I have read.

So now I can sleep at night knowing that although my computer is dying, my data is safe and sound. It is quite refreshing.