In high school, my English teacher assigned a research paper designed to prepare us for college. For a reason that escapes me now, I chose to write mine on the political and personal satire in Gulliver's Travels and Alice in Wonderland. I can't really tell you why, but I can tell you that if you think you have issues, you should read up on Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. It took an amazing amount of research, and I do credit the work I put into the paper as good preparation for college. But not just because of the research.

Around 8 o'clock the night before this fifteen page beast was due, I headed into the basement where we kept our Tandy TRS-80 (for real) to start writing.  I've always worked well under pressure (ironically writing this very StickyLetter the day before deadline), and at that point in my life I enjoyed the occasional all-nighter. So write I did, all night, but save I did not.  Around 2 a.m., I had a good structure to the paper and was about twelve pages in, so I decided to print the report and read it on paper. Yet, I did not save the file. Somewhere around page six, my noisy dot matrix printer started chewing on the paper. In my efforts to straighten it out, I pulled the printer plug out of the socket, but it wasn't the printer plug--it was the Tandy TRS-80 plug. With one strike I lost twelve pages. It was an awful moment. Right there I learned the hard way to save and to back up files lest I be stuck with a computer disaster.

Fast forward a few years (OK, a little more) to present day. I have a great personal computer—a MacBook—that I adore. It is full of family photos, videos, my music files, the files of my family Web site, and all the other stuff that you put on a personal computer. Because of my love for this computer, I bought it an external hard drive to do regular backups.  And I did—once—sometime in 2007. So, two weeks ago when all my MacBook would do is display the international "No" symbol, I got a little nervous.

I whisked it off to the Genius Bar certain that anything called the Genius Bar would be a place that could solve anything. They tried, even hooking up the hard drive to what looked like a heart-lung machine for computer hardware. As my genius so eloquently put it, my hard drive was "hosed."  My MacBook was then shipped off to Texas to be rebuilt and I walked out of the Apple store empty handed. I was bereft, but mostly I was ashamed. I know better. I had learned the importance of backups and saving early on. Plus, by virtue of the industry I work in, I know better than the average folk. So why, why, why didn't I have a more recent backup? The best answer I can come up with is because, well, I am a nincompoop. After many hours of sifting through CDs, emails, and Web sites, I've reclaimed about 80 percent of the data I lost, but the rest is gone for good and I have no one to blame but myself.

It's never fun to lose something, nor is it fun to admit when you're the root of the problem. But both are valuable lessons. Can you really fix something you've done wrong if you don't acknowledge your part in it? Once I managed to stop feeling sorry for myself for not backing up the hard drive, I spent some time educating myself about the best way to backup valuable data. By the time my rebuilt computer arrived at home, I was ready for it. I now have automatic backups scheduled! The peace of mind is amazing.

What lessons have you learned the hard way? Email me and let me know. 

Holly Bourquin
hbourquin@sqe.com

For more articles on time and project management, software development, and testing, peruse the StickyLetter archive.

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