The last decade has yielded amazing technological advances. Nearly everything we do has a digital component. While many people use handheld devices like Blackberries and iPhones to communicate, they still have the handy old desktop or laptop to host all their data and do the real work. As hard drives continue to hold more data, our appetite for storage continues to grow as well. At home, we have gigabytes of pictures, music files, movies, and oftentimes all of our financial data (e.g., via Quicken). At work, you have hundreds or thousands of documents that represent your company’s intellectual property. Losing some of this data can be catastrophic!
The perils of relying on technology are often overlooked until you sit down at your computer and see a black screen with the most terrifying words a technology addicted person could see – “disk boot failure” (see image to the right)
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- Ohhhhh Nooooooo!
or “Drive C not found”.
That was the msg that greeted me last night. After a futile attempt to reboot my PC to convince it that the hard disk was fine – it was only confused, I had to resign myself to the fact that my HD was fried. Over 30,000 pictures of life memories, financial transactions, school work, e-mail, and countless other files from the last 10+ years that equaled about 100GB of disk space were potentially gone in seconds!!!
Not so fast though. This is where you either laugh or…fall on the sword. Fortunately, I am well aware of the value of a HD backup. Not only do I have my work computer backed up in 3 places (PGP encrypted of course), but I also have my home computer backed up on 2 devices. I did an xcopy backup of the whole computer to a WD Passport Essential 1TB external drive ($129), which I keep in a fireproof safe (just in case) and I use the standard backup utility through Windows to backup to a Maxtor 250GB drive. Thus, I had a good chuckle looking at the black screen and taunting it back – “you didn’t get me this time!”
As many of you know, no matter how damaged your drive is, the data can usually be retrieved, but at a significant cost and an unbearable level of consternation.
Think about it. If you turned on your computer at home or work today and you got that dreaded black screen – would you laugh or would you have one of the worst days of your life?
Everyone should have a goal this year to assure your data at work and home is backed up routinely. The cost to do this is nominal and sofware can automate the process for you. You can make it really easy on yourself by organizing your data so it’s all under one folder structure, then just back that folder up, but it’s a good idea to do a full system backup as well.
p.s. the computer is still laughing at me because I still haven’t figured out how to fix the disk to restore all the data
