You don't know what you've yot ''till Its gone

My office machine is crumbling again. It went through a bad patch a few weeks back and I thought I'd put it back on the straight and narrow, but now it is becoming seriously wobbly. I think it has actually reached the point where it is more trouble than it is worth, so a rebuild beckons.

This means that I am frantically backing up all the files that I think are important, prior to a day spent reinstalling everything. The problem with this is that you don't know what is important until you lose it. I work on the "distributed backup" principle, which means that the files that are vital to me are smeared over three machines, my office, my tablet and my home computer. This works pretty well most of the time, but it is not unknown for vital files to drop through the cracks.

When I do the rebuild I will of course build onto a brand new disk, and keep the slightly broken one as a combination novelty paperweight and get out of jail card. The idea is that I can probably get it to work long enough to pull off that file I didn't think I needed, but turns out to be vital. In fact, I have a little pile of such discarded disks in my cupboard at work.....