Prevention

"It's better to be safe than sorry." "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." How many times I have heard those expressions! Well, this week I was privileged to experience their wisdom for myself.

Part of the journey to simplicity, I have learned, is to de-stress your life as much as possible. Part of that involves prevention.

Prevention in itself can be stressful. It takes time and energy and probably money (doesn't everything important?). But the minor stress you experience in your act at prevention does not compare to the major stress you experience when the worst comes to the surface.

In my case, "worst" means a crashed computer.

Oh, there's a tiny glimmer of hope. (I haven't heard back yet from Jasper, the computer guru.) But I'm a realist at heart. The prognosis is not good for retrieving any kind of data from my computer.

I was complacent because I had Raid, the extra hard drive which was supposed to mirror the regular hard drive. But alas, nothing is ever guaranteed, and Raid failed along with its mirror image, and the first thought that went through my mind when I saw the dreaded screen which had the word FAILED in it a few times, was, "Oh no! I haven't backed up my pictures to CD since the middle of 2004!"

I have learned a valuable lesson. If I take a few minutes to back up data, I'll probably reap the benefits for less stress in the future. And that sounds like simplicity to me.