This is my periodic public service announcement. Take 10 minutes (or maybe an hour) right now and back up your computer or your phone or your iPad (or maybe all of them!)
Burn a DVD of all of your photos.
Run the backup program that you have but never use.
Go investigate a service like CrashPlan who will back up automatically for you every night. (We love them.)
Look up a tutorial for how to backup to the Cloud or DropBox.
I can 100% promise that you will never ever regret spending the time to do that. Our hard drive melted down last week. As you might have guessed, I use the computer a lot. I have hundreds of MBs of design files. My entire exhibition that goes up this fall lives entirely in this computer right now. And the hard drive had a malfunction and it completely croaked right in the middle of checking my email.
That photo. That’s exactly what my screen looked like. That is one dead hard drive.
It wasn’t a crisis. Because it was completely backed up. It was very annoying. The computer was in the shop for a week; it took several days to download all of the files to a new drive. I drummed my fingers a lot because I had a lot of work to do last week. It could have been a disaster.