A hard lesson learned

Late last week I had a somewhat unnerving experience, I walk into my office and turn on the computer and then go back out to make a cup of coffee expecting my computer to boot up into windows so I could copy across all the files that were on my laptop. It didn’t.

Try as I might, I simply could not get the computer to boot, I sat back in the chair with a horrifying realisation, my files, 8 years worth of them, were lost. Including all of the pictures I have ever taken with my SLR camera, my entire history of artwork, plus a load more all gone, replaced with a flashing cursor.

So, with me working in IT, you would expect me to have backups right? Well here’s the really ironic thing about it, I did keep backups, I even have an external hard drive that I keep attached to the computer for just that purpose, however, rather stupidly the week before I had wiped the drive, to backup another computer, and never got the chance to make another backup of the primary system.

So just like that, I learned the hard way, that I should NEVER go without a backup. In fact it’s taught me just how stupid it really was, not only that, but given I work in IT, I should have known better, I should have set an example, but heres a few things that might help you in the future, and yes, I am doing all of them.

It’s not the end of the world
Data recovery services do exist, and whilst it’s expensive, your data can usually be retrieved by these guys

Don’t go cheap on backups
Getting an external hard drive isn’t cheap, but it isn’t expensive either, spend some money on a suitably sized backup drive, and pay for some decent backup software, you’ll be glad you did

It’s expensive but it’s worth it
Most modern computers allow you to have more than one hard drive set up as something called a RAID array. There are many different types of RAID array, but the one we’re looking at here is called, Mirroring.
You buy two hard drives, both are the same size, e.g. 1tb each hard drive, put them in a new computer, now, this doesn’t mean you have 2tb of space, if you set up as a mirror that is,

Instead, all you ever see is 1 hard drive, however everything you do is copied, seamlessly to the other hard drive without you even knowing it, so if one goes, you can simply remove it, and replace it, with no loss to your data, couple that with an external hard drive and your in a pretty good position to safeguard against failure.

A bit of housework goes a long way
Windows has built into it a tool called Checkdisk, and I would advise you run a checkdisk once a week at a minimum, it ensures your hard drive is in good condition, and you can automatically correct certain errors as well

Believe it or not, none of this is hard to do
Buying an external hard drive is easy, plugging it in is easy, installing a tool to backup is easy, and setting it to do it automatically is easy as well, most of these things are really simple to setup, one click tends to do it all, and do it once a week, or if you hardly use your computer, once a month, if you use it daily, backup daily.

RAID is also easy to do if you are setting up from a fresh computer, before installing you’ll usually see something on your screen that says ‘Press Ctrl + F to enter fastbuild utility”, once you go in, it’s usually very easy to spot the option that tells you to set up mirroring, then you just install as normal, or if you’ve taken an image of your hard drive, just restore the image!

The housework is easy, windows lets you set up scheduled tasks in a really easy way, so set chkdsk to run every week automatically and you’ll never have to worry about it, ok so it’s a tiny bit more complex about this, but it’s actually quite easy to set all of this up, and it’s how I’m doing it.

For about 200 pounds, I’m able now to protect myself against this happening again, as for now, my hard drive is currently sat somewhere in amsterdam, being examined, and it could cost me in the region of £500 to repair. and thats a one off with no guarantee that the data I get back will be any good. £200 may seem a lot, but actually, it’s well worth it for a reliable and guaranteed backup solution.