I had a hard disk crash last week. While it led to a series of aggravating and painful problems, I am glad to say that I came away a whole lot better off than I thought I would, thanks to a collection of systems I had been using.

In particular, the Mirra personal server that I recent reported on (see LCD Collaboration) really saved my bacon, having backed up all my documents. But I also would like to point out that Yahoo Calendar and Plaxo also played a big role, since I was too dumb to tell the Mirra server to "mirror" my Outlook folder onto its separate hard drive (a mistake I will soon fix). Yahoo allowed me to reclaim (most) of my appointments, and Plaxo gave me back all my contacts. Thanks to those services, it took me only a few hours to get back to work, once the PC folks returned my laptop, reformatted.

All I really lost was the spit associated with setting up all the apps (which I will most likely to struggling with for weeks), and the last three of four months of email. Sigh. So If I have had a recent email exchange with you on anything important, you might want to fire off copies of the last handful of emails my way.