It is pretty difficult these days to survive with a digital companion of some sort.  Most people now have computers of some sort, be it a; PC a MAC or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or maybe a smart phone.  I am a self confessed gadget man and rely heavily upon my technology.  Today's blog fits into coaching efficiency, prompted by my partner's unfortunate experience over the weekend of a hard disk failure on his relatively new and state of the art Sony Vaio. 

I came back from Harley Street on Saturday afternoon to find a Vaio with a black screen with lots of white 'Operating System' speak on the screen.  Those of you who have experienced a computer crash or if you have used DOS, you will know what I am talking about.  Of course I tried everything that I could think of to try and recover the system and get it to boot into Windows and sadly, nothing worked.  It seems as though we have a classic hardware failure in the form of the Hard Disk Drive or 'HDD'.

Unfortunately my partner had not done a back up since May of this year and we then discovered that this back up did not include the Outlook.pst file which stores all of the email data for Microsoft Outlook.  We did not even have a recovery boot disk that Sony encourage you to make when the machine is first run.  Now admittedly it is not the end of the world as this is not his sole machine, however, digital photographs that were taken recently and all emails have now gone.  The key message is BACK IT UP to everyone reading this who has a computer and does not do it.  It is not a question of if this might happen to you, it is more likely a question of when it happens.  You can make backups of your data onto CD's, Memory Sticks, External Hard Drives and Remote Servers.  Whatever you choose, choose something and back up your data regularly - at least once per week.  There is an upside to everything of course and in this case the there are a few.  The machine is still under warranty and will be replaced and my partner is now forced to do some spring cleaning and re-organising of data and after all, it is never good to be too reliant on anything because probably one day you may have to do without it.