I'm sure you've all been told to back up your laptops and phones regularly. If you're anything like me, you ignore the advice and assume nothing will ever happen to your beloved devices. I'm here to tell y'all that it isn't true. Even if you're incredibly careful and don't do anything to harm your device, sometimes technology fails us. Sometimes software corrupts without any reason for doing so.

I spent the better part of my Saturday at the Genius Bar trying to figure out what was wrong with my laptop. Early that morning, a notification popped up that some software updates were ready to install. I hit "accept" and waited for my laptop to restart. Only it didn't. It got halfway through the restart process before the screen went black. When I went to do a hard restart, a screen popped up with the same message in eight different languages: "Your computer restarted because of a problem. Please press any key or wait a few seconds to continue starting up." I pressed a random key and hoped that my problems were solved.

Instead, the Apple logo appeared on the screen with the usual restart progress bar underneath. The bar made it about a 1/10th of the way, a code popped up in the upper left corner of the screen, and the screen went black again. Then the 8 different languages screen came up again, and the cycle began all over again. The kind folks at the Genius Bar informed me this was called a kernel panic, and my laptop was stuck in a cycle of kernel panics. I got lucky and there was no hardware issue with my laptop, but the guy said that the best way to fix it was to completely restore my device.

I didn't have a full backup of my laptop at home, but I needed the issue fixed. I allowed them to wipe my hard drive and restore the laptop to factory settings, and I went home to reinstall everything I need for my laptop to be useful. It all worked out fine and I didn't lose anything crucial, but please y'all--back up your devices! Don't be like me. Don't let a scary incident shock you into backing everything up. Just do it.