I cannot believe this.  I've been using many computers to work on this thesis, so the majority of my data has been stored on a 10 gig external hard drive, which is fine, until your hard drive crashes to a terrible horrible death.  A graduate student's absolute worst nightmare, 3 weeks before defense, first draft submitted, but data GONE.

Luckily, I have enough of a reptile brain to email myself backups of some critical things, including the thesis and the presentation.  So I'm not totally screwed.  And I have old versions of the data analysis that I can salvage, but they're probably 2 months old.  All my modeling files are fine - thank god. 

So much for relaxing in Key Largo.....