Hard drive failure imminent...

I hate hard drives.  I have had so many hard drives crash in my lifetime.  I mean, computers haven't really been around that long if you think about it.  I didn't start using a computer in school until I was in high school.  And it was some Texas Instruments thing that used cassette tapes as memory devices!  You pushed play and it would load whatever program you wanted to use into memory.  Prehistoric.  But right now, I kinda wish I had something as reliable as cassette tapes.  I'm sitting here looking at a red flashing light on my backup drive.  The good thing is that it is my backup drive but the bad thing is that I have used it recently to save a lot of other things on that I never backed up anywhere else.  So I'm feeling pretty foolish about it right now because I know these things happen.  A lot.  One of these days I will learn my lesson.
And maybe one day Deuce Maverick, Private Eye for hire will learn his and thus continues his story...
Like I said, it was raining.  Hard.  And it was lightning and thundering too.  I've always wondered why the phrase is normally used "thundering and lightning" when really lightning must precede thunder. Either way, both were present and hitting hard.
I was sipping a beer, watching the rain come down in sheets when the knock came at my home slash office door.  Now, most of the private eyes on TV have a glass door.  When someone comes up to the door, you can kinda see their silhouette in the glass.  I guess it makes for good TV because it primes the scene and builds suspense. 
I don't have any glass.  It's just a solid, wooden door.  But it does have a peephole, one that I installed myself with a do-it-yourself kit from Home Depot.  Or maybe it was Lowe's.  Either way, I put it in myself.  And of course I dropped it in the process.  At the time I didn't think anything about it but later I discovered that the glass inside had broken somewhat.  It still works, but only if you want to see the person at your door from the waist down.  Which is alright by me cause most people hold their guns about waist high.
I took a quick look out my busted peephole and decided that based on the waist down view, I'd probably take the case.  She was well dressed, with black leather boots, a long flowing skirt, and one of those gargantuan designer bags to match everything.  She looked like she had money and for a PI with a lease to pay, she looked pretty good.  I just hoped that she had a case that would take some time.
Now contrary again to the popular notion of TV, we PI's do not normally lead adventurous lives.  Most of our time is spent staking out double wides looking for husbands that are two timing their rich wives with some Huddle House skank.  Sometimes I get cases that are more interesting like the time a man paid me to hunt down his killer before he died.  He was certain someone was after him and he wanted to know who it was before they got him.  Unfortunately, he choked on a meatball at Luigi's Italian Restorante before I could find the culprit.  And before I could get paid.  Such is the life of a private dick.
So I opened the door thinking I knew exactly what was coming.  A crying, older lady who just knew she was being cheated on by her old man and wanted me to prove it so she could collect the lion's share of their combined fortune and get to keep the house.
Boy, was I ever wrong about that one...