When people think insurance they think the usual, home insurance, mobile phone insurance, holiday insurance and holiday insurance, but when Tesco Compare Home Insurance got in touch with me to write about what I’d insure it was simple to me, it wouldn’t be the most expensive of items, it’d be the priceless items that were simply irreplaceable.
Do you remember that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie Bradshaw’s trusty Mac “sadmacs” and she loses her entire portfolio of work, bar the odd jumbled coded mess? As a blogger, a writer and even as a person of the 21st century – that’s my worst nightmare. Turning on your computer to find all your music, your precious photos, all your writing, gone.
“When was the last time you backed up your work?” Aiden Shaw, the perfect of perfect boyfriends asked Carrie Bradshaw – not so perfect when he’s pointing out the obvious when an entire lifetime of work has been deleted into the digital recycle bin in the sky, never to be recovered.
“Backing it up” isn’t just something you should save for the dance floor of your favourite club, when it comes to your files the same protection should be taken as if you were about to share your bed with somebody.
When I first started Ginger Girl Says, I lost 3 months worth of hard work and late nights when my web host decided to crash and lost everything. No amount of website refreshing would bring my blog back to life.
“Just start again, it’s not a big deal” I was told.
Not a big deal? I felt like I’d lost half of myself. My blog is “my baby” and as pretentious as it sounds, its my “brand”. I’ve worked bloody well hard to get it to where it is now and I’m proud to call it a portfolio of my work (maybe the odd post I’d rather be accidentally deleted). When my blog disappeared into that bermuda triangle of Word Documents and .JPG files my brand was esentially a blank page. How could I market myself based on a blank page and no portfolio?
Luckily (or unluckily) I, like Carrie, learned the hard way that I was the only person on earth not secretly saving their work to an external hard drive like the Seagate one which I rely on “just in case” some digital disaster were to occur. I can sleep safe in the knowedge that should my computer become defunct, blow up, get stolen or my webhost went into meltdown, I’d have everything saved on a little black box of saviour. That’s why I’m a patron of “the back up” (both when it comes to computers AND the dancefloor). I’m now that annoying person like Aiden Shaw who asks “wasn’t your work backed up?” when people complain that they’ve lost all of their work and nods them in the direction of an external hard drive – also known as a safety net in a machine.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from that experience and from Sex and the City (lets face it, I’ve learned a LOT of lessons from that programme) it’s that insuring yourself against digital loss is as important as taking your pill in the morning or remembering to turn off your hair straighteners when you leave the house in the morning (pregnancy and hair tool induced house fire = every single girls worst nightmare).
DO YOU BACK UP? BACK UP NOW.
*post in collaboration with Tesco Compare HomeInsurance but the pain was real
Hey beaut, hope that you’re OK. I had totally the same thing happen to me a couple of years ago and they expect you to just start afresh, it’s like losing a limb. Glad that you’re still on the interwebz. Where would we be without you? x