go ahead an back it up. NOW!
The second restart sorted out the booting problem, it probably took a while longer than usual to boot, so just move on with your life and your Mac while ensuring that you backup on a regular basis.
You didn't specify what model of Mac you have but whether laptop or desktop makes no matter, they both have Time Machine which you do not have to "remember" to use. Just keep the external plugged in and you are golden
P
So my mac crashed while I was watching tv online, so I reboot the computer and came to a recovery screen asking me to select Macintosh HD or Recovery 10.9.4 (or some other random date/code, I forget already). So upon looking at which to choose on my phone, I took the Recovery path and preceded as far as I could get until it wanted me to connect to the internet. This I could not do because it would not find my home network. So partly from despair and partly in hopes of some miracle turn of events, I reboot from there again. This time though, it loaded completely normally, even opening up an internet browser window I had in the background while I was watching tv in another window. Internet history didn't show anything from the previous half hour/hour or so.
So my question. Should I be thankful for some automatic recovery path some brilliant techie made part of the software, or should I be very, very scared of a looming disaster? I had not backed up my computer in a long time (I have an external hard drive which I always forget to use), but I am hesitating about backing my computer up now if it is perhaps infected with something. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

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