Christine at Peet's was nice enough to make me a special latte in light of my recent bad luck. This just put a huge smile on my face. :-)

So my car was broken into on Friday and my Macbook was stolen.  This isn’t a post to discuss that incident.  What happened has happened and in honor of the fast approaching lunar new year, I’ve decided to be more Zen – Possessions Are Fleeting.  This is more about the events after the theft. 

I did the usual things like filing a police report, getting my window fixed, and cleaning up the car.  Next, I needed to get my digital life back on track.  First, if I had actually used Time Machine like I was supposed to, the backup process would have been super simple.  That was strike one.  I use Mozy to backup my work files so those were easy to retrieve.  Since we migrated to Google Apps earlier this year, all of my email was stored on their servers so getting access to that was easy.  What was not easy to get back were my personal files – mainly music and photos.  Luckily, I sync those items with my iPhone so technically I have a copy of those on the phone.  The difficult part is actually getting them off the phone and onto my spare laptop.  Every time I try to sync with iTunes, it tells me that it’s going to wipe all these items off my phone and replace it with the items on the laptop (which at this point is nothing).  I’ve got a Genius Bar appointment tomorrow to try to figure out how I’ll be able to have my photos and music somewhere other than my phone.

So the morale of the story is back-up your computers.  Don’t rely on copying files periodically from your laptop or desktop to an external drive.  That’s a very ineffective way of doing things.  If you have a Mac, use Time Machine.  Have it set to backup at least every 24 hours.  If you have a PC, use Mozy.  It’s free for the first 2GB and only $5 a month for unlimited storage - use this link and promo code "FEBRUARY" for a 10% discount!  $5 people.  That’s less than two lattes or one lunch out or half a movie every month.  The point is it’s not much and well worth it.