Now I know this post doesn’t have much to do with web design and development, but it’s a lesson i’ve learned (almost the hard way) recently and I feel I should share it with you.
As you know by now I am a web designer/developer so you can probably imagine how important my computers are to me. At home I have a wireless network setup and a NAS (network attached storage) for backups. The network drive plugs straight into my wireless router and is accessible via the network.
I started using the free backup utility that came with the drive and have been backing up my files for a while now. I’ll admit that I dont really have a set backup routine, just as and when I feel like doing one to be honest. Mistake number one!
Last week I was surfing away on my laptop at home when I heard every I.T. savvy persons worst nightmare. A horrible scraping, clicking sound coming from my hard disk, then followed by the blue screen of death. After a few reboots and nearly some tears it came on again but was freezing intermittantly so it wouldn’t let me do a full backup. My last backup was over a week old (oops).
At this stage I switched it off for the night.
Luckilly, at work the next day I was able to plug the laptop hard disk into my desktop with an adapter and copy a drive image.For some reason the disk seemed ok at this point. A nice free program I found for this is called DriveImage XML. It basically, for those who aren’t aware of such programs, lets you copy an exact image of your hard drive and “burn” it onto a new one.
So I now had an up-to-date image of my laptop’s hard disk on my desktop pc. I ordered a new disk and as I type now, it is 69% into putting the “image” onto the new disk.
So what should you take away from this?
- Make regullar backups of your data
- Make sure that your backups are actually restorable
- Don’t wait until it’s too late to worry about it
I was really lucky to be able to access the disk anc copy the files off it before it died. You might not be so lucky…
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