I don't want to sound all foreboding here, but I would suggest to everyone to have an up to date backup of all the important information on your laptop.  Learn from my mistakes and don't go through what I did over the weekend.

You see, things were going great on Saturday, I got a lot of work done and I felt good with myself.  It was hot outside and so inside my home it was hot, but I thought nothing much of it.  Sure, the laptop was whining a little more than usual, but it is an older one, so it didn't bother me much.

I woke up on Sunday and while I was sitting at the computer, it froze and made a weird noise and I shut it off.  I left to run some errands and didn't come back until later at night.

When I came home and turned it on, I was in for a surprise - the hard drive was dead.  I fiddled with it for about an hour, and tried to find everything that I could on how to fix it, but I was unsuccessful.

I had to wait until Monday to go to the computer store and get a new hard drive, and then I began the arduous task of reinstalling Windows and all my software.  I didn't realize how much of a pickle that I was in until I went to restore the information from my external hard drive.

It had been three months since my last backup.

Great.  Now, I was kicking myself because I run my business off of the notebook, and honestly I would never know what I had lost.

What I learned from this experience is that I need to do a backup at least once per week and I have picked Friday that I will hookup my external drive to my notebook to back it up.  I am also looking into online backup solutions, and I might do a post on them later.

Just remember: backup your laptop!