There are some things that happen in life that leave an indelible mark. For me, there are some, not many, and of those, only a handful that drive a kneejerk response.

One of those events:

I walked into my office one Monday morning, sat down at my desk, and booted up the computer. To my horror, all I saw on the desktop were the standard issue Windows icons and nothing else.

With a frisson of foreboding, I started looking for my documents, files, emails. All gone. Oh, no! These were not personal items, but the very backbone of my work task list, what I needed to do my job. Projects, reports, correspondence all vanished into the Black Hole.

I called the IT people. They said that they had checked the computers in our section for viruses and unauthorized programs (standard procedure) and noticed that my computer was running sluggishly, and that there were a lot of junk files.

So, without any forewarning, they reformatted my hard drive.

Needless to say, I went through the roof. Like a million other idiots, I had not saved my critical files to a separate drive (no backup) and All Was Lost.

When I got through yelling at him (why didn't they tell me beforehand? even call me at home and let me come in and make a backup on my own time?), he confessed that they had intended to defrag the hard drive but had instead reformatted it. (I didn't know at the time that the data could probably have been retrieved anyway.)

His confession didn't improve my attitude one bit.

So now you know why I'm a fanatic about backups. When I finished the outline, bibliography, and first draft of my paper on Sir Francis Walsingham yesterday, not only did I save the file to my external storage, I printed a hard copy.

Once bitten, twice shy.