“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people – working as a TEAM – can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has!”

Nothing About Internet Marketing is Guaranteed.  But If You're NOT Doing THIS,
I CAN Guarantee ONE Thing -
You Are Headed for Trouble!

I purchased my first PC for office use back in 1987.

It was an Apple IIE (any of you "old-timers" remember them?), and at the time the salesman ASSURED me that it's "whoppingly huge" 250 K (that's right!  KILObyte, not MEGAbyte!) hard drive was all I would ever need!  Times DO change, don't they!?

Since then I've owned over a dozen, increasingly faster and more sophisticated machines.

In our move to our new offices, we purchased three new, top-of-the line Dell PC's.  Our main computer is a Pentium IV, running at 2.0 GIGAhertz, has 512 meg of SDRAM, and a 100 gigabyte hard drive.  With all it's other bells and whistles, it is the most powerful PC we could obtain at this time.  ('course, by next month, it will no longer be cutting edge, right!?)

Naturally, we transferred our entire hard drive contents from our older Compaq to the main Dell, and for the past several weeks I've been using it EXCLUSIVELY.  And lemme tell ya, it's a thing of beauty!  The cutting edge computer combined with a commercial, high-speed cable connection moves faster than corn meal through a goose (as we say here in the hills of Pennsylvania).

"O.K, O.K, Stan!  Just where are we goin' with all this!?"

Well, one of the things I've always preached to you Dogs about is backing up your computer's hard drive - often.  And since 1987 that is something I have always done - RELIGIOUSLY!  And guess what...although a week doesn't go by when I hear from one of you that your hard drive crashed, IN FOURTEEN YEARS I HAVE NEVER HAD A HARD DRIVE CRASH!

(You guys startin' to see where we're headin' with this now?)

I was so impressed with the performance of the new Dell, that I got overconfident.  I had about a month's worth of work on the hard drive...without backing it up!

One morning when I fired 'er up I started getting weird error messages, which got even weirder over the next half hour.  Finally I could not get Windows to boot up.

"No big deal," I thought.  "Just some sort of simple configuration problem." I immediately called my local tech guy, and while he was on his way over, I called Dell's tech support, and explained what was happening.  What the techie told me made me want to break down and cry...

"Your hard drive is toast," he said, all too matter-of-factly.  "All the data you had on it is gone."

Well, to make a long story short, my tech guy WAS able (after three days and a bill for $600.00!) to recover the lost data -something, by the way, that Dell said was impossible.

My friends, let this be a lesson to ya!  As I've stated so often in the past...

BACKUP YOUR HARD DRIVE ON A REGULAR BASIS!  IF YOU DON'T, YOU ARE ASKING FOR TROUBLE, AND IT COULD PUT YOU OUT OF BUSINESS OVERNIGHT!

Take it from the Big Dog, himself - NO one is immune!

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