Back it up

If I tell you another tree beside our house was struck by lightning last Thursday you probably won't believe me, so I won't tell you. My computer has been shipped off, new phones have been purchased again. Yes, we have giant, powerful surge protectors on the electronics and the whole house.
The front page of the Orlando Sentinel this morning says,"Warning! Florida can be hazardous to your health." Reading through the list we can put a check by lightning, hurricanes, Burmese pythons. I see alligators every time I drive to the Sanford studio. (There was one at our children's' school too.) They forgot to mention bears, we had two in our neighborhood. Oh!and the water moccasins, who knows how many there are in our yard. We have a friend who can check off sharks from his list.
So there won't be any pictures for a little while.
Back up everything...daily! I do it regularly so have CDs of most things. I had just refiled my photos the night before. The external hard drive wouldn't connect since the lightning had damaged the connection before and our repair person couldn't find a problem. The latent damage from lightning is real. I paid over $100 to retrieve everything when it could have cost as little as a short amount of time and the cost of a CD for the night's efforts. An external hard drive that won't connect is not a good excuse, go the extra mile and get it done, somehow. Think of all of your paintings sold and in some other person's hands. No visual record of them. The stories and great novels you have started. Gone. Your family history...poof.
Some services now offer an automatic daily back-up for $140 for four years. Things happen. Be proactive.
Thank you for the comments. I am still trying to figure out how to respond to some. Any ideas on how to reply so the author of the comment knows you appreciate their efforts? I can't always link back to them.