My Hard Drive

My hard drive crashed the other day;

I should have seen it coming;

The computer had gotten awfully slow and

The drive had started humming.

A crash like this is no surprise;

These things fail all the time.

Thus the need for backing up

Explained in this here rhyme:

Back up all your documents,

Especially your data.

‘Cause drives are like bad software that’s

Perpetually pre-beta.

So copy all those pictures off

Onto another drive.

And copy them some more times if you

Want them to survive.

Duplicate your videos

And music you’ve amassed

For when your hard disk crashes,

These files will not last.

Copy emails, copy chats, and

Every application;

Save yourself an ulcer and

Painful consternation.

Just copy the whole damn thing;

And copy it again.

Losing data hurts like Hell,

Each copy is your friend.

Copy onto other drives,

Copy to the cloud.

Copy anywhere and every

Place that is allowed.

Keep a copy in your home

And maybe in your car.

Have some copies near to you

And others really far.

Make copies of your copies

And duplicate those, too.

It’s better to have too many copies

Than to have too few.

All your digital memories

Could disappear like this

So back up everything you think

You might just one day miss.

I know all this because my hard drive

Recently got fried.

These are all the things I wish I’d

Done before it died.

Postscript: I wrote this after the drive crashed and I had lost everything. I actually managed to recover the data eventually. If you're curious about the process I went through, I wrote it up on my technical blog in Dealing with Data: A Hard Drivin' Tale of Woe.