Once, a long time ago, I was told by a well-meaning person that “everybody has a hero,” which was then followed up with the reasonable question of “who is yours?”

Well, I confess I’ve never had a hero.

I’ve never been into rock star adulation.

There’s nobody I can think of whose life or achievements I want to emualate.

For sure there are hundreds of people I respect and there are elements of people’s characters I want to have for myself, but does this make them a hero? Does this sound bad? Does it make me out to be a bad person because I don’t have a hero to emulate? And what has all this got to do with IT anyway?

Well, I discovered the other day that apart from my children who still think I’m their hero - even after I’ve just disciplined them for something - there is my mother-in-law and my uncle who count me in their ranks of heroes! The MIL won’t blink on her computer without having first checked with me. I’m trying to wean her off the habit, but when they purchased their PC I was asked via SMS if it was OK for them to buy it - now that was just silly.

Then there is my uncle who, in a roundabout way, asked if I could have a look at his munged hard drive. Trouble was, said drive had 43Gb of family photographs and videos on it and there was no backup! Long story short, I managed to recover his data, which has put me into hero status in his eyes.

I know, this is all a bit silly, but you get the idea. Are you anybody’s hero, and why?

Oh, and don’t forget to back up, back up and back up again!

[tags]hero, backup, data, hard drive[/tags]