Trust God, Even When You're Living Your Worst Nightmare

So this week has been pretty good overall. Except for one thing:

Tuesday night, my laptop crashed. 

It had ran a Windows 8 update earlier that day, and after hours of using it for school I turned it off and continued on with my day for a few hours, then,  I came to turn it back on, and it wouldn't start and kept saying that my operating system could not start and I needed to get the recovery disks out.
Well, Dell didn't send any recovery disks with the computer when I bought it. And it was late and I didn't have time to get on the phone with them then. All I wanted to do was to get on and download my camera which currently contained some awesome macros. Well that obviously wasn't God's for that evening.
So Wednesday morning my dad and I called Dell and talked with a rep for several hours, and we finally figured it out: My hard drive crashed.

THIS IS MY WORST NIGHTMARE COME TRUE.
 Let me explain why.

You see, I live a super busy life, and hate dealing with technical difficulties or learning how to, and regularly performing technical tasks - like regularly backing up files from my hard-drive to an external drive, and figuring out how to back up my Photoshop Lightroom catalog.
So that means its been several months since I've backed up my hundreds-of-thousands of pictures and documents and music directly on the hard drive, plus all of the organized, edited, and sorted photos I store in the Lightroom software. BOOM. To put it lightly, I'm really upset and feel like and idiot for being busy and lazy and putting such an important task off until a catastrophe such as this occurs.

Yes I'm aware of how important it is to back up my files regularly, and actually was planning on spending this next weekend figuring out how to backup my Lightroom and go through all of my files and remove what I didn't need, because I'm actually in the mood and have free time. Well so much for that, for now at least. I foolishly thought that there wasn't a need to rush on it because after all, I just bought the computer brand-new in February and only 80GB of 1TB of the hard-drive space was filled (and the laptop I owned before this was Dell and before it was mine it was my dads so when I finally decided to replace it with this one the thing was almost 10yrs old, and not dead but I needed something more bigger and more powerful). Everything was running normally it seemed, it's been super fast and programs were operating normally. But obviously something was going on...I wish it would've happened after this weekend when I was going to have had everything backed up and safe.

Today a tech came by and replaced the hard drive. So I'm using my laptop now as I write this. Its like brand new, nothing on it, and I wasn't even singed into Chrome at the time of the crash, so all those bookmarks I had saved with evidence to use to compile briefs for debate? Also gone. Oh well, I guess I'll stick with the pre-fab briefs for now. As a novice I'm probably better off doing that for now anyways.
But now comes the hard part: getting all of my files off of my old hard-drive. I'll have to take it somewhere because I obviously don't know how to go about that. I don't even know how bad the crash was. But I really hope that there's a way for them to get all of my files out of Lightroom especially. I have so many pictures in there, a lot of them rather important - several folders about to be submitted to contests, family and extended-family-family portraits that need to be printed, yearbook stuff, portrait and event shoots for friends, and a ton of other stuff that I really do not want to loose.

Oh well. I know that everything happens for a reason and though not all things are good, they will work together for good (Romans 8:28). Although I have to admit that at this time I am still frustrated by the current situation and don't see how me loosing all of my school work and photography and music is a good thing. Maybe it's God saying I need to get a life...But then again He's given me talent with a camera and lots of opportunities to use that gift to capture His creation. Hmm.. I really don't know why this is happening. But it'll work out eventually I hope :)

So getting to the point (I'm really not trying to pitch a fit and whine to y'all), I believe I've made my impact by telling y'all whats happened to me and my beloved laptop this week. So what was the point of all that?

PEOPLE, FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, CONSTANTLY BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER FILES TO AN EXTERNAL DRIVE,

YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN IT WILL CRASH AND ALL OF YOUR HARD WORK BURNED UP IN A DRIVE CRASH.