Happy June! It's pretty hard to fathom how fast the year is going by. Just think: in January I was still thinking of putting a ring on it, and by next January a wedding will be mostly planned. Unreal.

Anyhoo, waaaaay back in the day I was rocking a Windows PC I built myself. Hard to believe, right? But you know, when I got out of high school, I had zero money for a Mac. They had those slick blue G3 towers that I wanted so bad, but they were so out of reach it wasn't funny. So with my brother's help and a couple of parts from a friend, I cobbled together a cheap beige box with a 750MHz Athlon chip and a 20GB harddrive. Oh man, that thing was a beast in 1999. And I put that thing through the wringer too.

Fast forward to 2004: On my third homebuilt rig, I have about seven years worth of data on my harddrive when I tried to install the Windows XP Service Pack 3. For some reason it didn't take, and I tried to dial it back to SP2. When that didn't work, I tried reinstalling Windows over the existing files. While that did work, it also resulted in my user folders being locked away in some weird-ass glitch so that I could no longer get to them. While I wasn't very forthright about what happened (who wants to admit they'd fucked themselves?) it was still pretty traumatic. My digital life was over! So I started anew, my lesson learned: back up religiously. And about six months later I got a Mac and it's mostly been smooth sailing since then.

Now, in 2009, I'm cleaning out my stuff in preparation to move in with my fiancee. And my brother, who now does IT for a company that makes artificial anuses (anusi?), lends me his dongle that turns any IDE/ATA device into a USB- mountable drive. On a whim, I hook up my old drives that I just never parted with and am able to pull up every single file I thought lost. It includes old photos, music, almost everything I'd written from 1997 to 2004, and old versions of my website! All this stuff that I thought I'd never see again is now available to look at and edit, and I'm made close to whole again.

So guys, let this be a lesson to you. Back up your shit. Like, four times if you have to. And if you don't, and your data gets corrupted, don't get rid of the old drives. You may be able to get at your old files one day. And if not, at least you have a long-winded blog post to write, and some ridiculous clip art to attach to it.