Apple has all of my love.

It's about that time, and finals are upon us once again. As you can see, that doesn't stop me from updating my blog.

I realize that it's been a while. I've had a ridiculous amount of research-related work to do (and mistakes to fix -- yikes)...and it the moments that I'm not working my little first year butt off, I've been heading back to the mitten to celebrate my cousin's upcoming wedding, and spending some quality time with the family, good friends, and boyfriend.

I have several milestone moments to share with you once finals are over and grades are in, but I have a moment to share one now...so here it goes.

The milestone moment for this post is: My First Tech-Related Full Scale Panic Attack.

When my sister and I were in middle school and high school, my Mom used to walk past the door of our home office and yell "SAVE!" to remind us to save whatever we were working on. While a little annoying after a few years, it DID jump start my obsessive habit of saving every document as soon as I open it. However, all the saving in the world won't help you in the face of a hard drive crash.

When I started grad school, I knew it was going to be important to back up important data somewhere else. Thus, most of my important files are actually saved several places. However, in order for this to be effective, you need to be doing this regularly...and someone got kind of busy, and well...forgot.

So yesterday when my hard drive crashed, I had a small conniption fit. Luckily, the IMPORTANT stuff was saved (to the cloud, to email, to external hard drive, you name it)...but the little things -- my outline for my cognitive psych midterm? My latest picture uploads? Potentially gone. Not to mention all my software and saved personal settings (what the hell was my Skype password again??)

Enter the Mac store.

When I showed up for my genius bar appointment, I found that despite whatever repair needed to happen, I wasn't going to have to pay anything. Which on my stipend was excellent news. The bad news was that the hard drive was done for. Had I really just lost everything not consciously backed up?

Nope. While in the back, the "genius" I was working with found one of my documents that I desperately needed, and transferred it over to the new hard drive for me! On top of that, the screen was cleaned and dust removed from the keyboard. Long story short, I lost a couple of things, but all of the crucial things are back in business and running perfectly.

So..I've learned two lessons this week.

1. Back up everything all the time. ALL THE TIME. And don't get lazy and forget to do it for a week.
2. Buy Apple products because even though they fail sometimes, the people at the Apple store will do everything they can to help solve your problems.

I'm spending some quality time this morning working on backing up my files again, and organizing everything back into better organized folders, and reinstalling all of my software.

BACK UP YOUR FILES.