In my 20 something years of using a computer, I've never had a hard drive fail on me. Of course that doesn't mean that it will never happen. In fact, statistically, it'll happen at some point to everyone.

For me, that "some point" was this week. My 500 GB hard drive gave out after a few days of making funny noises. At first, I ignored the issue, but then I noticed that my computer was getting slower and slower. Eventually, the computer stopped booting up and the spinning sound was really loud. I caved and went to Fry's the other day to buy another 500 GB hard drive for around $90. Fortunately, the old drive is under warranty, but I wanted another identical drive to act as backup. The thing is, I had a 250GB hard drive that was being used as the backup drive. However, you try using 250 GB to backup 500 GB. See my problem? The 250GB drive filled up and I had to exclude some files from the weekly backup. As a result, I lost some home videos, and some episodes of "The Office" that had been stored on my computer.

Windows Vista came through for me once again though. After installing Vista on the new hard drive, I plugged in the old drive, and went to the "backup and restore" program. In a few minutes all my old files were being re-copied over to the new drive, in all their original locations. I still have all my pictures and music, as well as my documents and financial information. Phew.

I haven't figured out all the files I've lost, but in the end, I'd rather lose only some of my stuff rather than all my stuff.

Lesson learned: back stuff up!