There are many activities in life that I don’t remember starting to do.  When I was a kid, I had much better dental hygiene.  I would always brush twice a day.  At some point, I just started being lazy and would often skip brushing.  It’s become such a bad habit now that it feels like a chore to brush my teeth.

The same (but opposite) with gaming.  Sure, the first console I owned was an Atari, but it wasn’t something I played with regularly.  I didn’t own another one until the Dreamcast.  Sometime during college or shortly afterwards, though, gaming started becoming a really central part of how I got my entertainment.

This is all to lead up to the fact that I don’t know why I develop certain habits but I wish I could tap into that part of my mind, because there’s one habit I haven’t quite developed yet that scares me.  That habit is backing up my data.

Currently, most of my whole documented life, post high-school, is on this computer: my resume, my college essays, my taxes and finances, my wedding photos, everything.  In a second, due to a lightning strike or a hard drive malfunction, I could lose it all.  This terrifies me.

And yet, I don’t have a really adequate backup system in place.  I buy hard drives, cheap as they are now, only when I need storage space and have never really set up a mirror of the most important data so that I have at least two copies of things.

A week ago, my external drive, which holds all of my media, started giving me write errors about once a day.  Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet, order a set of hard drives, and learn a bit about RAID.

If backing up life was just as easy and inexpensive, how sweet would that be?  Had a rough day?  Get distracted while driving and have an accident?  Just restore your life to your last backup.  As long as you’ve been backing up regularly, you won’t have to go back too far.  Then, just do it again.  Except better.

Unless, of course, LOST is right and you won’t really be able to do things any differently (spoiler!) and will only have to relive the mistakes you made all over again, just in a different way.  That’d be pretty depressing.

Now, a few more thoughts about habits before I leave you for today:

  • Speaking of habits, learning the guitar will make a new one for me: clipping the nails on my left hand much more regularly.
  • I need a haircut.  For some reason, I never feel like getting one, although I don’t dislike the actual hair cutting at all.  I think it may be because I feel like sitting still for 20 minutes while someone cuts my hair is wasted time?  It doesn’t make any sense, I know.
  • I need to drink more water, too.  I go through phases where I’m really good at hydrating myself and times like now when I’m not.  Bottled water does make it easier, but it’s such a foolish thing to purchase.
  • Writing an entry each morning is fast becoming an entry and helps me start the day.  It’s starting to feel pretty good.
  • That said, my blog posts used to be funnier and I think the language used to feel more natural.  Maybe in time I will return to my former glory.