What would you do if you lost everything on your computer – downloaded emails, photos, music, documents – everything ? Would it matter to you, or is everything on your computer “not essential” to your everyday life and mental well-being? Well, if anything on your computer is worth anything to you – BACK UP NOW.
I am speaking from experience as I “lost” everything on my laptop last week.
Background – My laptop is from 2002 and I haven't really used it the last 2-3 years except for watching DVDs because I had no internet in Allston. Therefore, I hadn't done any tech updates for 2-3 years. So, this summer, I thought I would get upgraded with all the Microsoft software updates, etc. When I did, I got the "blue screen of death." Couldn't get past it, even in 'safe mode.'
My last backup was probably in 2004 or 2005, so everything since then is gone forever. However, since I didn't use my laptop for much, rather saving everything on my work computer, and since I didn't have a digital camera, and since I didn't buy music online, etc... it's not much of a headache. Sure, I know I lost some things - I just cannot think of what besides a handful of documents - nothing major that I can remember now (I don't know if that's good or bad!).
The biggest pain will be restoring everything from the backup CDs and uploading all my music (provided, that is, that my laptop works - I haven't restarted it since I got it back).
For only $100 you can buy 320 GB of memory on an external hard drive. So answer me this : You go to the dentist annually, you take your car in for regular check-ups, you call friends and family to check-in, you pay your insurance premiums and update your policy and safe-deposit box, you have alarm systems on your cars and homes, you might even go to church on “C&E” to save your soul – so why don’t you take your computer in for a check-up and why don’t you back up your data?
Back up your data now. Make it a 2009 resolution. Back up now, back up in July (or after you’ve uploaded your summer vacation photos) and back up at the end of the year. Do it now.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
There seems to be something in the human DNA that prevents us from doing backups until we lose data. No matter how many times people who have lost data tell them to do backups.
I had a disk failure on a work machine and came across the best software trial scheme I've ever seen. It did disk recovery and recovered some amount of data for free, say 10 MB. Then it said to recover the rest of the data please pay for the full version, $50 or whatever. I couldn't get my credit card out fast enough.
The Mac's Time Machine solution is very nice. It just backs stuff up every hour and lets you get at old copies, keeping one per hour for the last day, one per day for the last month and one per month for as much space is on the disk.
Post a Comment