Backing up ... can I have an "amen"?

So a couple of weeks ago I lobotomized my desktop computer by cutting a circuit breaker while the thing was running. I'd anticipated the possibility that the trip overseas might kill the thing; the trip actually took out my DVD drive, but that wasn't what killed the computer. In any case, before I left, I cloned the entire hard disk of the computer, and asked my mother, who was following me a week later to look after her mother here in Athens, to bring the backup disk with her. (I was skirting the top edge of my luggage allowance.) Then, once I unpacked the computer and saw it worked, I told her to leave it behind to save weight, because she had so many other things she wanted to bring.

Of course, once you tell someone you don't need the backup, that's when Murphy strikes and it turns out you needed the backup after all. Thank goodness for international shipping.

Took my brother a week to put the thing in a box to mail to me in Athens. But it arrived Friday morning, right as I was racing out to go to work. (I left early and arrived late ... don't trust taxi drivers in Athens any farther than you can throw their cabs.) I got back late Friday evening, opened the box, and in fifteen minutes from the time I opened my computer's case, the computer was up and running just as well as it had been the week before I left New York.

Course, it took me a whole night to clone the hard disk back in the City, but that's what you might call an investment on the front end that paid off handsomely on the back end.

The only problems left to solve require some sort of Internet connection, and I'd be having those problems even without the crash.

Dreary day in Athens today. Cloudy, rainy, rather chilly (though not like a winter in the City). Not much to report beyond that.

Off to scrounge some lunch and find a UPS battery backup for my computer. Again, an investment on the front end.

Here endeth the lesson.