What's a girl to do?

      Last Sunday morning my computer crashed. What I first thought was a corruption in my Windows software turned out to be a problem with my hard drive.  Replacing the hard drive was easy, but it lead to certain other problems that were rather frightening to me. The worst of these problems was the potential loss of data. Rather than risk this possibility by my own mishandling, I took my computer to an expert who was able to install a new hard drive and transfer all my data files, ending my half-week of alternating between panic, depression and chess-withdrawal.

     Just as in a chess game, sometimes certain unexpected events (moves)  highlight disturbing  weaknesses. I'd backed-up my files sporadically in a limited fashion. In transferring my chess files (mostly chess-history related), I learned I had 6.4 gigabytes of data. There is no way I could have backed all that up even if I had been diligent. I shudder to think how much data I'll have when my new drive crashes, as it surely and eventually will, since it's ten times larger than my old one.

      Five or six years ago, I uploaded about 3,000 chess-related pictures and made a web-accessible chess gallery. The website host interpreted this as file-storage and shut me down. I uploaded to another website and was shut down for the same reason. Since I access the internet through a dial-up modem, uploading this many files is a major project and one I didn't care to try a third time, so I simply shelved the idea. Now I have probably 10,000 pictures.  My point is that data grows exponentially, but the means to secure it grows inversely. The more information I store, the less my chances of preserving it. I feel like a funabulist and the higher the wire, the further away the safety net.

     My computer is back working but I have a huge amount of work to do to get it where it was before the crash.

     What's a girl to do?