Don't put off till tomorrow what you can back-up today

Last night go down as one of the worst days of my techy life. At around 8:30 PM an event happened that will go down in the annals of this computerfile's technological history. I fired up my trusty Celeron and got a very disturbing disk error on the screen. After several hours and a trip to Western Digital's knowledgebase yielded a diagnosis that the hard drive had suffered a catastrophic failure and would need to be replaced. I'm in a bit of a state of shock at the moment. You see I had booked some time during the Christmas holidays to do something I've been meaning to do for quite some time, back up all of my files. At this moment I have some files backed up on another computer, but unfortunately I have lost a substantial amount of information. I'm at a loss for words especially since over the years I've recommended to friends and family that they back up regularly and often. During the last few years I've lost alot of that diligence due to my busy schedule and other factors. I knew this would come back to bite me in the ass at some point. Safe to say, I've had enough of computers for a while. I will pack away my old Celeron as it will never run again, it has been nothing but problems from day one that I bought that motherboard some four years ago now. Nope, my plan is that a few weeks from now we will be in a new year with new challenges and new rewards and one of these rewards will be a shiny new computer. As it's a new year and we will be on the lee side of the first decade of the 21st century what more fitting time than to change platforms. I also figure that as long as I have to start almost fresh having lost a good portion of my past work, I may as well start fresh with new software, a new operating system and a new paradigm in computing. By now the reader is wondering where I'm going with this, well I will not leave you straddling the fence. Some of you know that I've dabbled in Linux, but that's not where I'm going. Nope! My next machine will be a MAC Mini and I plan on purchasing it sometime in the next month. I'll have more details on the machine and my first impressions in an upcoming post and eventual podcast.