When lightening strikes twice...

Now you would think at my age I would know better.

Last year, a nearby lighting strike had taken out my cable router. Ok, not a big deal. I was out of Internet service for four hours until the cable company could repair the damage and I could get to the nearest Best Buy to buy a new router and a surge protector.

Lesson learned, right?

Not necessarily.

Last week, my neighbor, the retired dentist, had lightning strike his ham radio tower. It could have been devastating. He, and his family, were not home at the time but the lightening strike had blown out an entire 30 foot wall of his home.

After eight hours of the cable company repairing the line damage, I booted my cable modem and was ecstatic to find that the surge protector had done its job and my Internet connection was restored.

What I didn't realize is that my back up external hard drive, you know the one that contained over sixty hours worth of completed video training screencasts, was directly plugged in to a wall outlet in my office.

Long story short, I lost the entire hard drive and all its contents.

Lesson learned:

For a small investment of less that $20.00 in an additional power strip with a surge protector, or worse yet if I would have taken the time to crawl under my desk and plug the hard drive into the existing power strip, I could have saved myself the agony of re-creating an entire training video series.

How important is your data to you?