What would you do

What would you do if you woke up this morning, second to last day of class and a week before final exams, to find your computer spewing error messages and the hard drive making a rhythmic kind of click-click-click-click-click pause click-click-...?

Would you feel worse if you kept all of your grades electronically and they were stored on that hard drive?

Don't panic. You prepared for this. You did prepare for this didn't you?

It wasn't too serious. My primary hard drive failed overnight. It wasn't too serious because I back up my files every morning about 3am, and I back up my gradebook to another computer every 15 minutes (the last backup occurred at about midnight when the grader was entering the final homework of the semester).

Still, it took about 3 hours to copy my data back and bring my computer back up. That included walking myself over to ITS to physically get a new drive since everyone was in a meeting over there.

Just yesterday I told one of my classes, I don't actually know how most of you are doing. I just record it in my gradebook and see how the numbers come out in the end. If I were a paranoid person, I might think someone tried to take advantage of my by-the-numbers nature.

You never know how a backup regimen will play out until you need it. I feel pretty invincible right now.