Back Up, Back Up, Back Up

A couple months ago our Dell computer hard drive experienced a critical error. Cosmic ray? Power surge? Old age? Bad attitude? Who knows, but the result was devastating. Local computer nerds at the Embassy took a look at it to see if they could help fix it, or at least salvage the data files. Nope. If we want to recover the data files (photos, documents, etc.) we have to send it away to the super geeks. That may take a while, especially since we live on the other side of the world from all the high tech geeks. Our world at present is that of low tech, very low tech. And poor infrastructure. And lots of randomness. And chaos. And pollution. And camels. And gers. And nomads. (Okay, it's not really as bad as it sounds) Anyway, back to the computer stuff. Thankfully I backed up most of the digital photos I had on the Dell to CD-ROM and I spent some time yesterday copying them all into iPhoto on my MacBook. Hooray for back ups!! Unfortunately, I was real busy the year before we moved (learning Mongolian, organizing all our junk and then there was also the kitchen renovation ugliness) and I neglected my routine. As a result, there is an 18 month gap of back ups from 2008 to mid-2009. Hopefully these photos can be recovered from the broken hard drive. If not, luckily I do have a sampling of the best photos as part of this blog. =) And that is also backed up. So, lesson learned ... regularly back up.

Sadly, I lost more than 40 hours worth of financial work I did to prepare for 2010 tax returns and it cannot be recovered in time so I have to do it all over again. Hopefully the second time around it will be faster. The bright side of this situation? I have picked out some new software for my Mac ... called PigMoney ... to use for budgeting, reports and taxes. FUN! I like the name. A lot. Oink!

*coin image borrowed from Google Images