Day after day, you read my ramblings about what goes on in front of the computer screen. But what you may not know is that there are a lot of things going on behind the computer screen as well. By that, I mean that I also experience many of the ups and downs that typical PC users experience, as well as UPS Battery Backup problems. And before someone starts trying to sell me a Mac, let me say that I fear I would end up in the same situation as Carrie and Ayden (Sex and the City) if I were to get a Mac and something happened to it. You remember when her Mac crashes and he hits Ctrl+Alt+Del and then it really melts down? And the Mac repair guys says they are incompatible because of their computer choices? Ayden would be me. Because although I meanwhile know a lot about PC’s and can generally figure out what to do when something goes wrong…I would almost certainly kill a Mac with my PC knowledge without even trying. That prospect is not inviting to me in the least!

If you’re a fan on Facebook, you probably saw that recently I had a big scare when I thought that all the posts in my blog had been erased. Thankfully it was just a glitch with the database but what it made me realize is that even though I get weekly backups of my blog emailed to me, sometimes that’s just not enough. If you have a blog yourself and run WordPress, you should think about installing something like the free WordPress Database Backup plugin. It’s a simple plugin that will allow you to run a backup of your database with just a few clicks…or if you prefer, backups can be emailed (or saved on your server) daily, weekly, etc. Your core files of layout and such will still need to be backed up manually, but at least you won’t lose all your posts and comments.

Because I write on new posts all the time, I realized after my scare last week that a daily backup is really more prudent. But it’s all a question of how often you’re adding stuff to your blog. And if you’re really concerned about hackers, I also recommend the WordPress Defender ebook with instructional how-to videos (this is an affiliate link) which is loaded with lots of quick, easy ways to better protect your WordPress blog from attackers.

As if the blog scare wasn’t enough, my laptop also started crashing yesterday for no apparent reason. And I have to say that when Vista crashes, it’s even more fun than some of the others because your screen just sorta fades out for instead of going to the blue screen. Then you may get a blue screen when it tries to reboot and fails. Otherwise you just wonder if your battery died or if something has otherwise gone horribly wrong.

I have been telling myself for weeks now that I needed to back up the files on my laptop, but so many other things just kept getting in the way. So when the laptop started flaking out on me yesterday, I knew it was time to take action. Despite the laptop only being a few months old, I’m not exactly easy on my equipment and treat my laptops more like huge desktop PC’s, running tons of programs at once while I edit photos, look up this and that, and otherwise just keep my RAM full at all times. So now I’ve added some reminders to my google calendar (which is my life saver in the chaotic zone I call life) to save all the files on my laptop once a month, as well as backup website files for things like WordPress that I don’t edit and save on my computer. If you’re not very good at checking things off your to do list, you can also try software like Cobian Backup (free open source backup option) which will automatically back up your computer to another location (at home, on a server, online, etc). But the nice thing about it, is that you can schedule downloads of all the files on your web server too.

Now in case you’re thinking it’s just been a technologically bad weekend, we actually had a lot of other success with our desktop PC’s and our ISDN phone. We’re well on our way to repairing one computer that had been giving us trouble for about 18 months now (just waiting on a few parts)…and will be replacing our very unstable old Dell computer that is running as a server. And we finally got our oh so nice phone system hooked up after it sitting around the house for almost 2 years because. I don’t know why it sat around that long; it really wasn’t all that complicated for Stefan to put together.   I, on the other hand, couldn’t have hooked it up correctly if lives depended on it. Probably because I don’t know enough about the 20 cables that go into phones and ISDN boxes here. Even though Stefan had been dreading the installation since the moment the phones arrive, he went in there and took over like a pro, and probably only needed about 15 minutes altogether to get the right cables connected to the right places. Having a cordless phone that holds a charge for longer than an hour and doesn’t have dog bites all over it is SO nice.

So now before you do anything else today, go back up your files. Computer crashes always seem to happen at the least opportune times.