The day my laptop died

At Kellogg, it is sad predicament that my life revolves around my laptop. All my classwork - mostly in Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents - are done on my laptop. Since the OS4 update slammed my old iPhone's performance, I have also been writing all my emails on my laptop. Add to this that I prefer to keep all my classnotes (and work notes) in electonic format, and you can start to see that this damn thing is almost an extension of my body.

Yesterday my laptop died.

At first I felt I should be panicked, but I wasn't. In some ways, I had been waiting for this day since I first bought it, approximately two years ago. I'd set up live-backups of my most important directories to a could-based backup service, so the most recent versions are stored online as soon as they are stored on my hard disk. For my other documents, I have nightly backups set up to an offline harddisk. I've never tried recovering anything from the offline backup, so things may still all go horribly wrong. Even though I have two big presentations and a massive final paper due tomorrow, I'm finding my problems are simply ones of inconveniance rather than "show stoppers".

Perhaps the moral to the story is that, when you're prepared for failures - even a laptop failure - there is little downside.