I think flowers are beautiful! I love wedding flowers, gardens, even the bouquets at our grocery store.  When it comes to receiving flowers, I don’t like the obligatory ones.  I want flowers just because, for no reason other than I was thought of.  We have to be careful what flowers we have in our home because of our cats.  Our one cat, Wesley, loves to eat flowers.  Certain flowers are poisonous to cats and we love him more than we love flowers.

You may be wondering why I am talking about flowers in a post that is supposed to be about my MacBook Pro that passed away.  Well, for Valentine’s Day, my husband brought home some roses for me and chocolates for the kids.  Although I don’t love receiving flowers on such holidays, I’m starting to change my opinion a little for my children.  The way my husband and I treat each other is teaching our children how they should treat someone they love and how they should be treated.  So I accepted  them and placed them in a vase on our dining room table…

We were getting ready to go to the movies on Valentine’s Day.  We don’t have a babysitter, so we had a family date instead.  I came out to find my flowers had been knocked over, I assume by Wesley who was probably trying to eat them, on to my MACBOOK PRO!!!!  WHAT!?!! I almost cried right there.  Instead, I grabbed a towel and tried to save it.  It didn’t seem like water was inside, so I was hopeful.

We went to the movies and had a great afternoon.  When I came home, I turned on the computer to see if it worked.

LESSON #1!  I should have googled before I touched it!  The computer turned on and worked for about 10 minutes, then shut down.  Right there I probably fried the computer because it wasn’t dried all the way.  You should give your computer a few days before turning it on.  This is when I broke down into tears, for a few hours.

I went to the Apple Store and they confirmed water was on the hard drive and everything was probably lost.  It would cost $1250 to send it in for repair and would only come with a 90 day warranty.  No thank you! I’d rather put that money towards a new computer with a better warranty.

LESSON #2 Have Insurance. Thank goodness I had insurance on my computers through my business insurance!  I had a check within a couple of days to buy a new computer.  But this doesn’t replace what was on the computer.  At first, I thought no big deal.  Sure, I was upset, bummed that I lost some important things.  I rarely used my MBP so I didn’t back things up on there.  I still wanted to try to recover it, but not the end of the world.  Then I was sitting on the couch watching a movie with my family and it hit me!  I always unloaded my iphone photos/videos onto the MBP!  Since 2012, nothing has been backed up.  More tears!

LESSON #3 BACKUP & PRINT!  I know, I should know better, right?!  I always take very good care of my client files.  But I don’t take as much care of personal files.  Once clients have their files, really, it’s not my responsibility to store them.  If I had lost a bunch of past client photos, it wouldn’t have hurt as much as losing all of my personal stuff that isn’t backed up.  I’ve lost enough stuff from when the girls were little because we had a hard drive fail.  So I made a day to back up every personal photo/video I have!  I have also started printing more because all I have from when the girls were little is what I printed.

I’m happy to report that with the purchase of an external adapter, we were able to recover EVERYTHING from my MBP hard drive before it failed completely. I can no longer get it to run.  I feel so grateful!  I now have a more powerful Imac to take on this year and will take my old Imac to the studio.  Everything is backed up and Crashplan is active!  I learned some lessons from this and hopefully you learn as well.  Backup your iphoto library!  Backup your photos!  Block out a day on your calendar every few months and GET IT DONE!