Flashback to 2003, 10 years ago. I was finishing a 10 page paper for one of my core classes in my Communications major, The Power of Persuasion. The class was extremely difficult but I absolutely loved it. It is the class that laid the foundation for my career and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to take such an amazing class. I have to brag a little – I was 1 of 3 out of 500 that received an A in the class. Despite the challenging material, I could really identify with the content and for that reason, I excelled in the class.

Anyway, as I was proofing my paper, pleased with my work, out of nowhere, my Dell flashed a blue screen. Long story short, my computer crashed and I was at ground zero in the midst of finals with nothing backed up. Luckily, this was a time before we took notes on our laptops and I still had my handwritten lecture notes to study from and my memory to rewrite the paper I lost. That Dell was my first laptop, it was bulky, heavy, slow and buggy – it didn’t even have wi-fi. The computer was just over a year old when it crashed. I upgraded and never looked back.

9 years later, after years of hearing people rave about Macs, I felt like I need to make the switch from a PC to a Mac. I live and breathe digital media and I was always the only PC in all of my meetings. I felt like I was being judged and I needed a Mac to further establish my company’s credibility. I am kidding but after much convincing I was ready to make the switch.

September of 2012, I migrated all of my PC documents to my trendy, light-weight, speedy, new MacBook Air. For the most part, I never looked back until last Wednesday.

I got to the office and I opened my laptop (that I had just been using 9 hours earlier) and I was greeted with a WHITE SCREEN. I turned the computer off and on a few times but the screen remained and I could not get past this blank horror. I asked my co-workers if they had ever encountered something like this. I heard Anthony whisper, “That’s not good.” Everyone rallied, playing YouTube videos and trying reset my computer but nothing worked. I kept ignoring the references to “WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH” on the Internet. You can Google a headache and after a few minutes convince yourself you have a malignant brain tumor because of what you read online.

I rushed my Mac baby to the hospital (Genius Bar at the Apple Store). Surely, this advanced, over-priced laptop could be fixed by the Apple team. After brief diagnostics, my computer needed to be checked in to the repair center. Until the computer was checked out by the repair team, I wouldn’t know if any of my data could be saved. Well after 2 days of waiting to hear the prognosis, I was told that they could not extract the data. They did however, offer me the option of visiting a website for a company in California that could possibly extract my data within 60-90 days for a mere $5,000. They had no explanation for why this happened to my computer.

Everyone’s first question is always, did you have everything backed up? NO – I wouldn’t be telling you this story if my data was backed up. I was cocky about my supposedly indestructible computer and never backed anything up. LUCKILY, I have a team of Genies that had my back and the majority of my important business documents. I was able to pull a lot from my email account. Many of my pictures were in dropbox and luckily I have years of photos saved on my previous computers.

However, I obviously, was not able to recover everything and I learned a valuable lesson that I should have learned 10 years ago. Back up your computer daily, you never know when the White Screen of Death is going to come knocking at your door.