There I was, working away on the new novel.

It was a Tuesday just like any other Tuesday until, midway through a particularly thorny passage, a dark veil came down across my screen, accompanied by the words, “You need to restart your computer.”

This was somewhat startling, and a setback, but certainly not the end of the world. My iMacs have proven to be very reliable machines.

But when I restarted the computer, it refused to boot.

So I tried again. And again. And again.

No luck.

I looked up the symptoms online, and learned that my computer had suffered a condition known as “kernel panic.” The good news was that a kernel panic isn’t usually fatal. And, in fact, after a few more tries, I managed to start the computer in “safe mode,” which let me run some diagnostic tests.

This time, the news wasn’t so good. An iMac’s disk utility can normally sort out problems that aren’t serious, but something had happened to my hard drive that couldn’t be repaired.

My trusty iMac had fallen victim to kernel panic, but that didn’t mean that I had to lose my cool. If there’s one thing I know about a computer – even a seductive, shapely Apple computer – it’s that one day, it will fail.

So I prepare.

A little external backup drive sits obediently at the base of my iMac at all times, like a lifeboat tethered to a yacht. And, in fact, it is a lifeboat: that slick aluminum drive, which is slightly smaller than a wallet, can hold a terabyte of data. A terabyte is one of those head-spinning numbers that people throw around when they’re talking about the contents of entire libraries and the like, but in my case, that terabyte of storage contains all of my precious, irreplaceable bits.

Well, maybe not all of them. But certainly a lot. The new novel, for instance, and all of the old ones. All of my columns for the Perry County Times, dating back five years. My various websites. My electronic tax records. My contacts. My family calendar. Our family photos. Years’ worth of correspondence. The repair manual to our GE refrigerator. Poems. Friends’ poems. Financial records.

In other words, the electronic soul of a modern life.

The backup drive is there precisely because this data is so precious, and because Apple makes the process of backing up so easy. Every iMac comes with a feature called “Time Machine,” which backs up the entire contents of your computer automatically, once every hour. If – or rather, when – your computer gives up the ghost, you simply plug the backup drive into a new computer, and Time Machine magically restores everything just the way it was on your old one in the moments before its untimely demise.

Unless, of course, the backup drive doesn’t work. In which case, you’ve lost everything.

My iMac had served a good long life. It was probably time for a new one anyway, so I went to the Apple store, braved a mob that was practically rioting for the iPhone 6, and bought a new iMac, which was cheaper and better than my old one. So far, so good.

But when I got home and plugged in the backup drive to restore the Olshan soul to my new machine, I got…nothing.

At this point, panic set in. My computer was cooked. My backup drive was cooked.

I was cooked!

Not completely, though. Over the years, I’ve developed strategies for distributing data here and there, in case of catastrophic loss – a house fire, or flood, or theft.

Granted, these efforts have been haphazard. A few chapters emailed to myself so I could work on them remotely. A really old computer in storage that still has family pictures on it, up to the year 2009. A CD-ROM of even older material in the safe.

But essentially, as far as my life of the past several years was concerned, I’d be starting from scratch.

An hour on the phone with a representative of Western Digital Hard Drives did nothing to solve the problem. I began to plan for a total loss of my data. There are companies that will disassemble your broken hard drive in a dustless room and magnetically scrape whatever can be retrieved, but it’s incredibly expensive, with no guarantee that anything of value will be recovered.

Then again, I’m not one to take “no” for an answer. I refused to give up on the backup drive. I plugged it into anything I could find and ran every available disk repair program.

The last computer in the house was my daughter’s old laptop. The backup drive lit up and chugged for a while, but eventually the same message appeared on the screen: “This disk is not repairable.”

I plugged it into my new computer anyway.

Lo and behold, it suddenly appeared on my desktop! There it was, a little orange icon with the beautiful words, “My Passport for Mac.”

My passport, indeed.

The drive was still damaged, and it took many hours of babysitting, but through trial and error, I managed to extract all the truly important files.

The photo library was a gigantic file. It took nearly an hour to transfer, and when it was done, thousands and thousands of family pictures loaded themselves into iPhoto in an extended burst that flashed each picture on the screen for a fraction of a second.

They say that when you’re drowning, your whole life flashes before your eyes. Apparently, that also happens when you’re saved.