Are You Prepared For a Computer Disaster?
Posted on June 17, 2007
Filed Under Computer/Internet Help |
This post contains affiliate links. If you find that backup software is something you can use, I would be thrilled to have you purchase through my links so that I might make a meager commission off these products. First and foremost, my goal is to encourage you to make backups, however you see fit! Thank you!
Will you be prepared when your computer decides it’s had enough? Wanna see a grown person cry? Watch someone when they find out their hard drive just crapped out and they hadn’t done that backup that they had been planning to do for so long!
There are lots of people that never give backups a second thought. They’re either “way” too confident about their current hardware, or they simply think they don’t have anything on their computer that they can’t afford to lose.
Well I would encourage you to NEVER have total confidence in your hardware, because it can and will fail sooner or later. And usually when you least need it to. Not to be pessimistic, but you should always follow the motto of the boy scouts and “Be Prepared”. Sure, computers and hardware have come a long way with reliability over the last few years, but they’re in no way immune to failures. And for those that think they have nothing to lose? There is probably a lot more information on your computer than you may realize. Got pictures? Music? Personal financial information? Emails? Contact information? And if you’re a regular computer user or make your living with your computer, then you absolutely MUST put a backup plan in place should you ever lose your system!
It’s so easy to procrastinate on getting a good backup of your system on a regular basis, but it’s really so easy to do! Yes, good backup software and extra hardware or re-writeable CD’s or DVD’s might cost a little money, but how much is piece of mind worth? I personally use software called Acronis. In the time I’ve been using it, it’s only saved my butt once, but that one time made up for 50 times the cost of the software & hardware! You just don’t know what a great feeling it is to know you’re data is safe should you lose your hard drive or system!
So what’s so special about Acronis? Nothing really. At the time I purchased it, I was just looking for home PC software, that was reliable and simple. Acronis fit the bill for me at that time and I’ve stuck with it. It was easy to set up, and it can be configured to run automatically or manually, and can do full backups or incrementals. There are other features that I haven’t even tried using. Another software package that looks good is Handy Backup. Both of these backup programs have free trial downloads that you can check out and see if they work for you.
Of course backing your data up is the first step, but if you’re serious about protecting your system, you should come up with a “disaster recovery plan”. Thats a pretty impressive sounding term, but it’s really nothing more than thinking through possible disaster scenarios, then figuring out how you would protect your data in the event of a disaster. Quite simply, if you backup your data to an external hard drive connected through a USB port, then you’re probably in good shape should you lose your internal hard drive. You “wouldn’t” be in such good shape if Heaven forbid your home or office were to catch on fire or get destroyed by some natural disaster.
So making a good backup on a regular basis is the first step, but you really have to give some thought to other potential problems and how you would recover in the event your complete system gets destroyed. Again…the extent of how far you take this is will probably be determined by just how important you feel your data is.
I hope this post was of some use to you. Perhaps we can dig a little deeper into “disaster recovery” in another post in the future. Got comments or questions, let me know.
Chris
Comments
8 Responses to “Are You Prepared For a Computer Disaster?”
Leave a Reply
I read your title and I swear I said “no” out loud. This happened to me before so you think I would’ve learned from the experience. I’ve just been so old school and never really explored other useful back-up systems. Thanks for the post, I might just look into it further.
I understand how you feel. In my “real” job at a company that is pretty much based on computing, backups are simply a part of life. You don’t configure a system without some type of backup device in place. It just doesn’t happen. I’ve always preached about having good backups at work, but at home it never seemed that important. Then one day a friend of mine lost his hard drive in his personal computer and was just sick over the whole deal. At that point I decided I had far too much important information on my computer to keep putting off a backup plan.
Good luck with everything and thanks for your post!
Chris
after 2 hard drive failures I use the following. Mirrored RAID drives which then backup to an external USB drive.
Having lost everything once, and having multiple hard drive crashes, I have learned my lesson. I back up to dvds at the moment, but it is always good to have another option.
Natron - Sounds like you’ve got it covered! Do you remove your USB drive after the backup and keep it elsewhere until time to backup again? Just thinking about things worse than hard drive failure
Genesis - I would like to back up to DVD’s but I have so much junk on my system that DVD’s are not an option. I could probably get a lot of the essential stuff that way, but I hate trying to figure out what is essential and whats not. Like Natron, I purchased a 180gb external USB drive and backup to it. My deal is that I don’t typically remove it from my system after making the backup. So if a tornado comes ripping through my area and throws my system and USB drive out into the middle of a field a quarter mile away…I’m just screwed!
Thanks for the comments folks!
Chris
I am paranoid like crazy and back up on multiple drives frequently. I also leave burnt DVD backup at work.
Hello Baseball Board Games!
I hear ya! Being paranoid is a good thing when it comes to backups. Hopefully more people will follow your lead. And I think that keeping a copy of your files somewhere besides your home is a great idea. All you have to do is try to imagine some of the worst scenarios that could possibly happen, then think about how you would manage to recover from them. Sounds like thats the exercise you’ve been doing. Keep up the good work!
Thank you for your comments and for dropping by!
Chris
Yah, backups are always a good thing. I’ve installed a second drive just where I backup using Windows’ SyncToy tool, just in case the old virus hits my PC at some point.