Last weekend, returning from Texas, we found that our computer had locked up... to the point that it would not reboot. Since our most important material is already stored on-line, it wasn't that big a deal to just go ahead and reformat the hard-drive so that I could limit the amount of down-time---or so I thought. Big mistake. I forgot that there were a lot of other things that were stored on it with no backup, things like our Skedaddle subscriber list and---even worse---the Christmas pictures. Years ago, we used to have a tape backup---more trouble than it was worth---that we never needed since the hard-drive never crashed. Fortunately, we had been having some problems a few months ago and I put all of our digital photos on CD and gave a copy to each of our daughters. Also a lot of our old files were backed up at that time on CD. Now when I have a few moments....

m.