I was speaking to a Phil, a friend of mine who runs a limo service here in the Isle of Man and who’s had a spot of bother with his PC. He had trouble for a few days, tried a system restore and ended up in a worse situation than he thought, with his Internet not working and all his applications messed up. Finally, he tried messing around with his Windows CDs and accidentally wiped his PC clean. And when I say wiped, I mean he deleted all his files, his photos, his videos, his emails, everything. And guess what … no backup!
What he really needed was an external USB drive to backup things to. And it wouldn’t have cost the world either. I was looking at the sale on buy.com and saw a 1Tb Iomega Desktop Hard Drive for a whopping $129.99 (at least that’s the price this week). With a hard disk that size you can take backups as many times as you want, and even take a few extra just to be on the safe side. It even comes complete with a license for some backup software that’s designed to make your life easier. Setup should be no more complex than plugging in a cable into one of the USB sockets in your computer.
So Phil, next time may sure you have a backup!
Absolutely! I adhere to the view that data which isn’t backed up has no value. In fact, I would add to your recommendation: buy *two* USB hard drives, one permanently connected to your PC for quick retrieval in case of emergency, and another off-site – in a drawer at work for example – which you periodically bring home to back everything up. And don’t just back up your data – use a utility such as Norton Ghost to back up your operating system too.
Because hard drives *will* fail eventually, it’s just a case of when.
Just had to comment on this post: I’ve lost data before and it’s painful…!