Back up.

On Monday night, he went to sleep around 11 p.m. with no problem.

On Tuesday morning, I couldn't wake him up. I pressed every button possible.

Nothing. Flatline.

I'm talking about my MacBook, of course.

Naturally, as Murphy's Law would have it, I needed the laptop for a seminar on social networking I was taking Tuesday morning.  I brought Andy's MacBook with me, but the battery was shot.

Later that evening, I took my computer to the Apple Genius Desk.  Turns out the hard drive was dead. Finished. Kaput. Thankfully, the computer is still under warranty.

Whenever I walk into an Apple store, I am faced with many purchasing temptations.  One day last spring, I succumbed to a rather significant, yet impulsive, lure: the Apple Time Capsule.

While the purpose of Time Capsule is to back up the harddrive, the appeal for me was the ability to plug my LaserJet into the box, thereby making printing wireless. That, alone, was worth the $299 price tag.

Of course, I'm using it to back up my system. With Time Capsule, it backs up every hour.

Losing the hard drive was tramatic only in that I would be without my MacBook for a few days. But let me tell you, knowing that my system was backed up to the little white box sitting atop of the armoire in my guest room was, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless.

I got the computer back last night and restoring the system has been easy. Of course I couldn't leave the Apple Store without picking up the latest update to the Mac OS X operating system.

So if you're not backing up your computer regularly, you're flirting with disaster.  And if you're using a Mac, invest in the Time Capsule. Worth every penny.