If only my computer were organised like my Pinterest account.

Way back in 2004 or 5, I sold a software Hama Bead Design programme that was, for a while, a very hot seller. It is the one I still use to make the simpler Hama Bead designs we put on the sites to give people ideas. Most of my friends had a copy and I had several; then suddenly it wasn’t available to sell anymore. It’s still one of the things we get asked for most but it’s demise was very total, as was the demise of my own copy, which gave up the ghost one day and refused to work any more. Various kindly friends have sent copies since; one disappeared in the post, one died an unearthly death, one is lost somewhere in my house where I put it to keep it safe. I think I am now in possession of what must be the very last copy in the world, sent to me recently by the lovely Maggie, just as it was about to be re-homed. Thank goodness for Maggie’s 😉 I’m treating it like a mini-god, because when it is gone, there is no going back. I’ll have lost it forever.

The advent of online life that saves itself, the iCloud, the online mail programme, Flickr, Facebook and blogging that took over from building websites the way I did when I first had one has made life an awful lot simpler. I’m quite glad I had those years where backing up mattered and you had to do a defrag orclean up your computer from time to time to keep things running. (Even if I didn’t learn to put things in a safe place I could find!) It got me into habits that only let me down occasionally and normally I do at least have things stored in one other place, even if the one other place is disorganised and awkward. I sincerely wish I had the same desk and hard drive habits of organisation that I do on Pinterest, where I can have everything just exactly how and where I want it. I’m a storage goddess on Pinterest. Sadly, I don’t follow through in real life. My hard drive is much like my desk, a serious mess :/

Does anyone put cds back in a box? Ever?

I got very lucky a while ago when I complained that my laptop was doing the blue screen of death just a little bit too often and decided that a new laptop was going to have to be the way forward. Our lovely local laptop people moved everything from one computer to another, I did a photo back up and we moved on, one newer, faster, shinier laptop and me with a life that requires less software that snarls up its workings. Only weeks later, the old one, now repurposed as Fran’s computer, suffered a very fatal hard drive death. I don’t know about you, but I’m not wanting to have to do a photo by photo download from Flickr any time soon, so I was breathing very deeply about that! Even if the worst comes to the worst now, I shouldn’t be inconvenienced by too much more than having to remember a large number of passwords, which is a distinct step up from the time I ended up sobbing in a corner because a dead laptop equaled 3 years of lost photos I had no copies of.

I don’t suppose I’m the only person in the world who has folders full of inexplicably filed documents, images and photos lodged on their PC in a higgledy piggledy hodge podge of soul sucking virtual clutter. I do know people with meticulously catalogued hard drives, Flickr accounts scrupulously organised into sets of perfectly tagged photos and a secret cloud of perfect archives on their very own server. That’s not me.

Which type of computer person are you? The neat freak with a hard drive hang up, or a hopeful hahazard hoarder like I am? And what do you rely on to keep things safe so that you don’t lose the things you care about when the plague hits the PC?