Stop what you’re doing right now and back up all your photo files. Burn them onto CDs, DVDs or put them on a separate computer or external hard drive. Now store them in some other building, or a safe deposit box at a bank. Don’t hesitate. Do it now. You may thank me later.

What prompted this tirade? You could title it “Sparky Stensaas’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.” A few months ago my laptop started acting up. It would shut down out of the blue. I was worried but also very busy doing bird surveys for the Minnesota DNR 70 hours a week. I couldn’t be bothered. I had all my photos from the past month along with 12 gigabytes of other important files and photos. Then one day…Nothing. It wouldn’t boot up. Only a cryptic error message would appear. Two six-hour roundtrips to the Apple store in the Twin Cities were in order. On the last attempt, they were able to spin it up and I downloaded all the “important” files to an external hard drive. The tech gurus at the Genius Bar gave me the bad news; the computer was dead. Strangely, Macintosh does not let the owner keep the damaged hard drive. They put in a new one for $270 or so.

Read the rest of the Sparky's column in our January issue...