One woman’s story and practical advice on how to backup your computer and avoid the anguish

"Mommy, can we watch the video of the Tatties washing the floor?”

Again? They’d just watched it yesterday and the day before and the day before that, going all the way back to the beginning of lockdown when we regretfully started allowing the kids to watch videos on my home computer.

Since then, bedtime stories had lost their charm, and instead, all they wanted to do was rewatch the same few videos again and again.

I took out my external hard drive (EHD) and plugged it into my laptop. A few months ago, my computer had died. The guy at the computer store had advised me to buy a laptop with very little memory (something with an SD card, he explained.)

I was very into decluttering at the time, and the idea of having a computer with a clear desktop and only minimal, used-daily information appealed to me. All the heavy data would be saved in folders on an external hard drive, to be accessed when necessary. Lately, almost every night.

But this night was different. When I plugged in the drive, nothing showed up. I jiggled the wire, pulled it in and out, saw something appear, but then quickly disappear. I tried again, with no results.

“What happened?” I asked my kids. “It worked yesterday, didn’t it?”

They nodded quietly. I detected a guilty look as they exchanged glances, but further pressing got no more information out of them.

Exasperated at having to visit the computer store again and probably have to shell out another couple of bucks again, I put away the laptop and read them a bedtime story.

Their quiet acceptance of this fate raised another red flag. They knew something I didn’t. And nobody was telling.

The next day, I brought the EHD to the computer store, wondering how many days I would have to go without my second head.

The guy connected it to his computer, fiddled it with it for a while, and then shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do with this. My computer doesn’t recognize it.”

“What?” I said.

“There’s nothing I can do with this,” he repeated, a little louder. “Did it fall? It looks like it took a hard blow.”

“Not that I know of. But I can’t promise it didn’t. My kids were using it when I wasn’t in the room. But hold on, you mean to tell me all the information on that drive is lost?”