New Year's resolution for every PC user

[Deleted member 30535]

If you don't know what the impact of losing a hard-drive would do for your nerves, consider getting an extra drive (internal or external) and use some free software (I use Syncback - excellent), and set up regular (I have daily) backups of your (unrecoverable) files.

I know it's a PITA to have to think about reinstalling windows and programs, but at least that can be done. But imagine if you lost all your documents and pictures? Nightmare.

For the sake of about £50 or less, and for peace of mind, do yourself a new year's favour and get organised with a backup.

Happy New Year!
:arty:

 

[Uridium]

good post Mr Incredible. Lost count of the posts i've read on here along the lines of "How can i recvoer all my photos from a failed hard drive"

simple dirty solution - get an external USB drive plug it in and drag n drop your photo's and stuff over!

MS Synctoy is a good free download from MS website and is stupidly simple to use for Backing up your files.

 

[s2martin]

Strange as i'd not even read this post but for the first time in 5 years I actually backed up my entire hard drive onto an external today

Great post

 

[mark.carline]

I have been doing this for years and its saved my bacon a couple of times !

Certainly a relief knowing your never going to loose all the family pictures & ripped cds.

 

[sapper]

Last year, I experiecned or was invovled in some six or seven cases of hard drive failiure

1. Back in february, the HDD of my PC at work failed - no major loss of data due to the work network policies
2. March/April Time, the Dell PC my sister and I bought my parents for Christmas failed - repalced quickly under warranty - but soem data was lost
3. On my media Box, one of the discs died in the mirror array - most data recovered as it was a array
4. Hard Drive on a Dell Desktop failed, resulting in a piece of equipemnt some £150K failuring due to a £75 HDD
5. Dell Lap top HHD failed - again supporting a piece of equipment - minimal data lost due to networking policy, though data was lost as the drive failed during a run
6. A brand new WD 750 GB drive failed within 2 days of intallation - no data lost
7. Just before Christmas, an SATA connection again on a brand new Samsung 750GB disintigrated, was able to recover the data but drive about to be returned to Scan tomorrow.

I am sure there is another case to mention but I cannot recall the details...

But yes please back up your data, preferablly on External drives and even DC-DVD for archiving

Adrian

 

[Uridium]

Just to add to this -


Unfortunately a friend of mine was burgled recently......they took most of his computer gear including his desktop Pc, Laptop and USB hard drive. almost every photo he had taken in the last 10 yrs was stored on the desktop Pc and backed up on to the USB hard drive that was also taken.

Not many of the photos had ever been printed. He lost the lot and was devastated.

I've since taken a one off DVD backup of all my photos and stored away at a relatives house for safe keeping.

 

[nburg01]

A part of the reason for lack of backups amongst users is the appalling backup software that comes with XP, that doesn't appear to do anything useful, and Windows 9x had nothing at all of course. Vista is an improvement, but why has it taken Microsoft so long to address such an important issue as backing up?

Added to this is the confusion over what media to use to backup. Hard disks are so huge that using 100s of blank DVDs is not really an option, DAT drives have bigger sizes but are far too expensive, so there's no choice but to use external USB drives and manually backup using 3rd party tools like synctoy or good old robocopy.

Backing up under Windows is still nowhere near as simple as it should be and Microsoft are to blame for this.

 

[abraxus]

I'm in the process of backing my data up as we speak however I've taken it a stage further.

I've spent the last couple of months setting up an HTPC to the point where it all runs smoothly. Any drive failure or problem caused by a windows/software/driver update or bit of random tweaking I might do would be disastrous and could result in weeks of rebuilding and retuning.

To prevent such a tragedy I've made a copy of my system drive with Norton Ghost onto a new hard drive and replaced the existing drive with the new copy, which I've also made an image of. The old drive, with a perfectly set up system, is now safely stashed away and if disaster should strike I can simply recover the image or (worse case scenario if the recovery fails) put the old drive back in and be back to where I am today inside 10 minutes.

Given the complexity of setting up an HTPC I felt this was a little safer than just taking an image with Ghost as it allowed me to immediately see that the backup was working when I put in it rather than try to restore when needed and discover a problem.

I can now update and teak away to my hearts content knowing that any damage I do can always be undone.