Always Backup Your Hard Drive

I'm learning the hard way that it's important to back up your computer every so many months so that if something happens, you're not up a creek.  After 5 years, my laptop's hard drive decided to stop working.  We're still trying to see if we can get the info off of old drive.  But everything that was on my laptop is now gone.  Poof, disappeared.  We had to replace the drive so I have a new one.  A month ago, I did back up all the photos I had on my laptop.  So thankfully, thousands of photos were saved.  However, all my documents and saved files were not.  There are only a few things that I'm pretty upset about if we can't retrieve them and they are some papers I wrote a few years ago in a college history course I took that got huge praise from the professor that graded my assignments and exams.  The other thing I'm sad about losing is I was keeping a written record of all the books I've read.  It's one of my interesting quirks.  I'm doing it because I'd like to see how many books I can read from here until the end of my life and so that I don't re-read something I don't want to.  There have been a few times where I've purchased a book thinking I've never read it only to get about 50 pages in and remember everything about it.  There were about 250 books on that list thus far and I have no idea how many I'm going to remember reading.  I know I can rebuild much of the list since I've enjoyed lots of books by the same author and some of them are a series like Harry Potter and the Twilight series.  I'm waiting to rebuild the list until I know for certain that it will not be able to be recovered.  I've lost all my bookmarked web pages, scrapbook and stamping project ideas that I found on the web.  I was totally sick to my stomach when it happened.  I turned on my computer and it wouldn't go to the desktop page.  It wouldn't do anything.  But like I said, I'm so thankful I made the decision to back up my photos and they were all saved.  I would have been so very sick if I had lost all those.

In other news, we're setting up for another hot and dry summer.  We thought we were going to get slammed today with a nice line of storms that was sitting over in Illinois.  The line of storms dissipated and we didn't get a drop.  The weather man says we're supposed to get some scattered storms today but I'm not holding my breath.  We haven't had rain in nearly 2 weeks here.  There has been no traceable amount of rain here in our little suburb outside of Indy at all this month.  We're watering the backyard as I type this.

I have a few photos of the kids that I'd like to share later this week.  I just replaced the hard drive of my computer a few days ago so I haven't had time to upload any photos.  So look for them in a few days.  I just wanted to explain my absence.  My computer died about 10 days ago and it took a week of trying to mess with it to see if we could get it back up and running before we decided to replace the hard drive and buy something in hopes of getting the info off of it.