What I Lost When My Computer Crashed

It happened last Thursday when my computer started to move really slowly. I thought it could be chalked up to a bad internet connection at first, but by Friday I knew something was really wrong. I couldn’t open my Zoom desktop app no matter what I tried, and had to take my calls through the browser. That was probably already the straw that was going to break my back, but it just got worse from there. Dashlane (my password manager that I can barely live 15-mins without using) crashed and wouldn’t open. I uninstalled and re-installed that and Zoom, but without luck of them opening. I turned my computer off and turned it back on. Every time I tried something, things got worse. I downloaded an Excel sheet that a friend sent me and it wouldn’t open - a critical Microsoft Office file was suddenly missing. Everything crawled to a slow halt. I did as much work as I could and put my computer away for the weekend. 

Monday morning I opened it up again and had all the same issues staring me in the face. It was time to hit the kill switch - start all over - wipe it clean and hope that a fresh beginning would solve the issues. So the first thing I was going to have to do was make peace with everything I was going to lose on my computer when I wiped it.

WHICH WAS EXACTLY....NOTHING.

I wasn’t going to lose a single damn thing. Although it is annoying and there is some set up time to get things back to the way I like them on my computer (like having my taskbar on the left side of the screen, having a short-list of apps in a particular order pinned to my taskbar, having some nice cycling images of beaches and water for my wallpaper, downloading the office suite and adobe photoshop), but compared with what it used to be like to have a computer crash, this was nothing.

Do you remember the fear, the anxiety, the panic, the gut-sinking feeling of total despair that used to come with a computer crashing? Please tell me you don’t currently have any of those experiences, because we are living in a post-crash world. For most of us using personal computers today, they are just a means for accessing the internet. Your iPhone might have more data storage space than your computer. Because it simply is not necessary, practical, safe, or even convenient anymore to store anything onto a computer hard drive. 

That’s right, I’m talking about the cloud. That misnomer of all misnomers. That mystical place that seems invisible and ethereal, but really looks like this:

The cloud is somebody else’s hard drive. Or drives, plural, to be more accurate. Or to be more technically accurate, someone else’s servers. A massive web of machines and wires and software that all of us can buy access to and is used for the incomprehensible amount of digital information and materials that can be uploaded, organized, encrypted, accessed, and shared.

Google drive, Dropbox, Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft 365, and every website that you log into and have information on (like Salesforce and other CRMs, Blackboard and other LMSs, LastPass and other password managers, etc.) are all doing it. They have the infrastructure and the security to offer that a single laptop just cannot provide. They can make back-ups and have redundancies that protect us from data loss in ways we can’t do as single-laptop owning people. Actually, you don’t even have to own that laptop. Borrow one from a friend or from the library or hop on one at the Apple store (wherever any of that is possible right now), and you can do just about as much as you would with a personally owned computer. Because whatever you have been working on can and should be saved on someone else’s machines, for two main reasons:

TO BE PART OF THE “POST-CRASH” WORLD AND LEAVE BEHIND THE PANIC AND PAIN OF LOSING WORK AND DATA WHEN A SINGLE COMPUTER GOES DOWN, AND

TO HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR WORK AND DATA FROM ANY LOCATION AND ANY MACHINE (LAPTOPS, TABLETS, PHONES).

Of course, nothing is perfect. There are security concerns with saving your stuff on someone else’s servers, not least of which is because they are a much bigger target for nefarious players. Plus what about those times that you don’t actually have internet access?

BUT WHEN WEIGHING THE RISKS AND REWARDS, I FAR MORE OFTEN COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT I SHOULDN’T SAVE ANYTHING ON MY LAPTOP’S HARD DRIVE. 

So when my computer was going down, I wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t even sweating. I was just dealing with the situation, knowing that I wasn’t going to really lose anything. That made me happy.

Nothing is ever cut-and-dry, so let’s get to the comments! Do you have a system you use that let you safely and securely save files onto your hard drive? Have you been meaning to move everything off your computer and into the cloud, but feel overwhelmed by the process? What is your favorite cloud storage application or website?

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Sneak peak for an upcoming post: how digital minimalism helped me set up my computer again in under 2 hours with no sweat or concerns.