Have you done it yet?

... all of you who said 18 days ago that you must get round to backing up your files and pictures?

The rest of this is boring and for my own record.

Last Tuesday evening I spilt a tiny bit of wine into my MacBook keyboard. I turned it upside down immediately and removed what was on the surface and it carried on working. I was surprised on Wednesday morning when it turned on as if nothing had happened. As a precaution I brought my work laptop home on Thursday evening but the Mac has continued working much better than it did before I manually backed up then deleted all those photos.

But this morning it was dead and no amount of cajoling would revive it.

I started unplugging peripherals (actually, intrinsics, but Apple doesn't 'waste' space on essential connections so everything has to be a peripheral on a Mac) and was worried to find my automatic backup disk already disconnected. How long ago did I do that? Then it dawned on me that my auto-backup disk is in Mac format and as I don't want another Mac I probably won't be able to retrieve anything recent other than the photos that I've backed up manually onto disks I've deliberately formatted to be readable by both PCs and Macs (exFAT, if you want to know). Problem.

I took laptop and auto-back-up disk to the Apple repair shop to ask whether it was worth trying to revive a six-year-old Mac. They were quite keen for me to spend £40 to find out what was wrong but when they said a dried spillage has done irreversible damage I decided to cut my losses and write it off. They kindly checked my backup disk and discovered I unplugged it a week ago. Not too bad, if I can borrow a Mac as a stepping stone to copying everything onto a new Windows machine.

But when I got it back home, it juddered into life. Amazing. I set it backing up onto my friendly multi-format disks as I dived out to a rehearsal. I dived back to set the next batch of backing up going before going out to visit a friend for the afternoon. Got back this evening and finished the rest of the manual backing up.

Phew!

Now, have you started those backups?