In my home office things are reasonably organized, at least, that is what I thought until yesterday evening. My PC was on as always, just running unattended when one of the fans stopped working. The machine must have heated up quickly and it did shut down. When I came to the office I noticed a remarkable silence. My first thought was that the machine had crashed. This is not happening often, but every now and then I do get errors. So I tried to switch it back on, without success. The PC simply would not start anymore. At that moment I noticed that the case of the machine was pretty hot, so it was not that hard to figure that there was a problem with a fan. I was getting frightened though, not having a clue if some serious damage was done. Of course at that time I realized that the last backup I made was like over a year old. This really got me scared. It would simply be a disaster if I would not be able to recover all kinds of data from that machine. After all, this is my main development machine. All kinds of demo code would simply have been gone, not even to think about tons of emails. Thank goodness the machine was not really damaged, so after it cooled off enough and after installing a new fan the machine is up and running again. It just felt like getting a second change, so today I spent all day long backing up every bit of data there is on that machine. With hard drives getting larger and larger, backing up information, especially if you are not using an external hard drive as backup medium is really a pain. I ended up burning a lot of DVD’s, but at least I feel safe for the moment again. First thing to do tomorrow though is buying an external hard drive and make sure to backup my data at least once a week. This time I was lucky because I didn’t lose any data. However, I will no longer take the risk of not backing up data anymore. There are a couple of advantages to this. With recent backups I simply don’t lose too much data when a disaster happens. The most important advantage though is that up to date backups probably prevent my machine from crashing in the first place. After all, Murphy’s law is always true around computers. So I feel safe now and assured that my machine won’t crash, because I do have a backup now.