(used up)^5

I guess the hits just keep on coming. As some of you may know, my hard drive hasn't been completely healthy of late. Yesterday I ran some tests and found out that things are actually worse than I had previously thought. A couple of months back, a lot of stuff on my computer started breaking. My monitor, my graphics card and my mouse.
Replacing these things cost me a lot of money. Money that I didn't really have. Of course, being a firm believer in Murphy's Law, I thought to myself "if all my stuff is breaking, then I can bet that my hard drives are next". Since I didn't want my hard drives to break down without me having a copy of all my data, I purchased a new hard drive. It turns out that it was just in the neck of time.
Today my sick hard drive decided to not be part of my computer anymore, and disconnected in mid-backstroke, so to speak. After nursing it back to health, it had decided to conveniently "forget" about a lot of my files, which I managed to recover while watching CNN and Discovery downstairs for a painfully long time.
It was a long and troublesome path, but now I have my data back. This incident, however, has convinced me that I need a new OS drive. I saw that they had recently dropped in price, so I might just go get myself one in the coming weeks. In the mean time, I'm going to be making more frequent backups of my system to ensure that I don't loose anything important, should my hard drives decide to quit on me again.

This is basically the last piece of computer hardware I can change before having to get a completely new computer. If anything else (motherboard, cpu, ram) quits on me, then replacement parts will be almost impossible to find, due to the age of the parts. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the electronics will last, and let me live to fight another day.

Now I just need a good backup program.