Get Insurance - A Real Story
Tags: reallife, insurance, advice
Published: 2019-11-09 12:20:23

---
title: Get Insurance - A Real Story
published: true
description: A real example of why you should get insurance
tags: real-life, insurance, advice
cover_image: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1508749650777-109740dddc77?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1350&q=80
---

### TL;DR

If have any things in your house: GET INSURANCE!

---

For those of you who missed it, I tweeted this out on Thursday:

{% tweet 1192538100557320194 %}

Essentially what happened was:

- the UK had a month's worth of rain in 24 hours
- many parts of the UK where affected
- there was chaos on the roads and railways

{% tweet 1192487538323283969 %}

Also, my home office was flooded out.

### Flooded

My home office was in the basement of my house - which was the only free room in the house. It was the room where I did remote work for my clients; it was the room where I recorded [podcast interviews](https://dotnetcore.show/) and [episodes](https://wafflingtaylors.rocks/); it was the room where I wrote my [open source projects](https://github.com/gaprogman) and worked on my websites.

Before the flooding, that room contained my:

- desktop PC - a machine which was less than a year old
- XPS 13 - a machine belonging to [my company](https://rjj-software.co.uk/)
- Apple Macbook Air

It also contained all of the hardware that I use to record the shows, and all of my books.

Right now, it contains a marsh-land of a carpet, a dehumidifier, and a radiator which is working 24/7 to try and dry everything out.

I was able to rescue the XPS 13, and the majority of the desktop (SSDs are safe, but the spin rust drives are gone), but everything else is ruined.

### Reflections

As I said in the edition of the newsletter [that I released shortly after the event](https://buttondown.email/dotnetcoreshow/archive/bfa87334-dc7b-4f40-9379-45e2cdaefa0c):

> First, I need to apologise for the potential sombre feel to this newsletter. Secondly, let me say that no one is injured or hurt in anyway.

There were a lot of people who were more gravely affected by the recent weather - there have been reports of people having lost their lives - and I'm eternally thankful for the fact that no one I know was harmed.

I'm also incredibly thankful that I have a multi-stage backup process. This is a process that I follow when creating episodes of the podcast:

- I record the episode or interview
- I store the raw files on a local NAS
- Those raw files are then backed up, offsite

At every step along the editing and rendering path, all data goes back through that same pathway. Meaning that, even though the majority of my drives where kaput, I still had two copies (one warm, and one cold) of all of my data.

And of course, I'm thankful that I have insurance which covers the damages. Once every thing has dried out, I will be able to have contractors in to rebuild, and I'll be able to get new hardware to replace the lost parts.

It will mean that things are a little difficult for me for the next month or so, but [The Show Must Go On](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t99KH0TR-J4) and it will do.

In short: GET INSURANCE!