Have you ever had your computer or hard drive fail? It’s not nice and unless you’ve got all your files backed up you could be in all kinds of trouble. This article tells of my experience with a recent hard drive failure and will hopefully encourage you to double check how and when you backup your important files!
Firstly, a little background information…
At the start of January this year I was unfortunate enough to have my hard drive fail on my computer. Usually the panic that comes with this kind of thing is often followed by relief when you restart the machine or swap a faulty power cable and you are back in business! Not this time. Nothing I tried would get my hard drive to boot and a trip to my local friendly computer repair shop confirmed it was well and truly broken. That is when the panic really sets it.
You try and think how long ago you’ve backed up your files to an external hard drive. You realise you’ve got urgent client deadlines to meet. You worry your online backups may not have worked – after all, when was the last time you checked? And to top things of, if you need your computer to earn a living you can expect the inevitable lost couple of days while you reinstall all your software and files on a new operating system. Not a pleasant experience at all!
When this happened earlier this year to me I was quite lucky. Most of my music and photos (with the exception of about a months worth of recent files) were safely backed up to an external hard drive. My client work too was backed up both to a hard drive and via an online backup service. Two in fact! I use Dropbox for the active client work I am working on and also Carbonite for pretty much everything else on my computer. A bit of a belt and braces setup to cover all bases as much as possible. Now it was time to see how they got on restoring my files…
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