For the holiday weekend, we've invited Laurie's mother, daughter, granddaughter, and daughter's boyfriend over our house for a swim and a meal. In addition, Laurie's son moved back home this past week, so he's also here.

I've spent most of the day indoors. Even at 5:30PM, the outside temperature is about 93 degrees, and I can't stand it when it gets over 80. I had downloaded a trial version of Backup MyPC at the end of May, so it was scheduled to expire yesterday. On Friday, I purchased the full version and today, I spent nearly 5 hours backing up my PC. The process should have only taken about 3-1/2 hours, but during my first backup attempt, the program came across a bad spot on one of the brand new CD-R discs I had been using. Instead of marking the spot as unusable and continuing on, the process failed with an unrecoverable error. All told, that first attempt wasted three discs.

The second attempt went to completion without incident, but during the verification readback step, the program signalled several errors, and now I don't know whether the backup is readable. I've also installed the software on my wife's PC, but she hasn't had an opportunity to use it yet. I don't know why, but I've had premonitions of a serious disk crash, and I just want to be prepared.