Who is your Backup? Here I sit, freeer now than I was a couple of days ago. The trauma is over, and almost forgotten. We all seem to collect stuff, and I collect as much as anyone, probably more. You see, I used to have a computer, that held all my photos, home movies, emails, etc, etc, etc. All this stuff. Now a lot of this stuff is very useful (helpful?) to have around, I had pictures and home videos going back to the mid '90s. Some pretty valuable stuff to me. Well, as you have probably guessed, a crash caused much of it to go away. Now I can hear you saying, that it serves me right, if I didn't have it backed up. Problem is, I did have a backup, a full current backup that was working perfectly. Then one day, the main, and the backup both crashed at the same time. I was doing my duty, trusting in my backup, and believing that two separate hard-drives would not both die at the same time. Well I am here to tell you that it can happen, it happened to me. Of course there is a longer story behind all this, but my point for today, is "Where are you placing your trust?". Are you trusting your backup, and is that backup trustworthy? Mine apparently wasn't. You can think of a backup like an old friend who is always there when you need him or her. As a Christian, I have a backup who is always there when I need Him. He is completely trustworthy, and will never fail me. In fact, as I look back a the circumstances that surrounded the crash, I think God may have been telling me that it was time to get rid of some stuff, some stuff that was just hanging around, stuff that I didn't really need. I do feel a lot freeer now. Who Is your backup?

Tom Zimmer

P.S. Technical background: I had two 1TB (Terra-Byte) drives in external enclosures, sitting at comfortable room temperature, that had been running without error for the past 8 months. When I turned them off to do some maintenance on another part of my system, they wouldn't come up again. Six hours of recovery effort later, I did manage to get my email back, a few (very few) of my home videos, about 70 percent of my music library and a few documents. Lets say I recovered maybe 20 GB from a drive that had about 700GB on it. The backup never gave another whimper, and the primary became progressively worse, until it was impossible to get anything else off of it. The good news, is that I had (for other reasons) done a second backup of my photos, which is now at about 55GB consisting of over 24,000 photographs. I got back what I "needed", and I lost what I didn't really need. Free indeed!  ¶ 7:22 AM