Backup you data!

The other day i noticed that my computer was taking extra long time to open a window so i decided to do a chkdsk check on my c partition, as it turned out it reported three unreadable blocks and told me to restart in order to "fix" it. After the restart i found myself staring at a gray screen when where usually windows starts up and takes me to the desktop.

Normally i would have done do a allnighter and reinstall everything but it was already one o'clock in the morning and i had a meeting to attend on that day so i decided to do the sane thing and do when i found the time.

Somehow i managed to get some sleep that night and went to my meeting with a negatively affected mood, thankfully my friends helped me to regain my positive thoughts and i enjoyed myself as one should do on a Friday :)

Finally i got home and started to look at the mess that was my desktop and found the situation wasn't as bad as i first thought thanks to a spare harddrive, a windows 7 install disc and some music on my Ipod to distract me from the bad thoughts, i pretty quickly got my computer to work again, this time allot faster thanks to windows 7!

So now the question was could i get my data back from the bad harddrive?, i can happily report that every file is now safely copied to the new drive :)

So as i write this i have a healthy system again with a fresh installation of the OS and the same positive feeling that things are back to normal!

So what can we learn from this?

- Harddrives (spinning parts or SSD) will die at some point, the when or how part is hard to know but thanks to software we can get a hint at least.

- Always backup your data!!

- Make sure to have your most important data on at least two different drives and if possible use a cloud backup solution just in case someone steals your computer or your place is affected by fire of floods!

- Most importantly dont panic, if you have your data backed up you will only loose a couple of hours reinstalling everything and restoring your data.

One last tip:

There is a trick that system administrators use where they first install the OS and the applications and then creates a image file of the whole harddrive so that when the moment comes to reinstall several computers at the once they just press a couple of buttons and the computers automatically copies the data from the master image file and with a reboot some time later is ready to use!

So what are you waiting for, backup your data!

What is you backup strategy?