- Perth, Western AustraliaBackup your data!
I can't stress this enough. Computer hard drives are complex electro-mechanical devices with lots of moving parts and they will inevitably fail, usually at the most critical and inconvenient time. Purchase an external hard drive and backup your data to it. All Windows versions since XP have a backup program built into them and while they are not perfect, they are certainly better than nothing. Windows 10 uses File Backup. Personally, I recommend EaseUS ToDo Backup especially with Windows 11 which only lets you backup to the cloud. Apple Macs have Time Machine built into them and it will seamlessly backup all your data to the disk of your choice.
Don't trust to luck to save your data, like the man in the above illustration. Just ask yourself, what would happen if all your photos, videos of your children and important documents disappeared one day due to a hardware failure? If you run a business it is even more vitally important that you backup, every day! A home user can get away with backup once a week but not a business.
I've seen the panic that sets in when I have informed a user that all their data is gone - one was a university student whose laptop disk had died. She asked "Can you get my data off my old disk?". When I told her it was impossible she turned white as a sheet. "My thesis is on that disk, three years of work!". When I asked her about backing up, she said "Oh, I stopped backing it up when it wouldn't fit on one disk anymore". This was back in the days of floppy disks.
Backups protect from more than hardware failures - corruptions can occur from viruses and malware, power fluctuations and unintentional deletion. Hands up those of you who have experienced an "Oh, no" second? That's the moment when you realise you've just deleted something very important.
Data Recovery
One of my services is recovering data from crashed
disks. Sometimes when a computer will not boot anymore, the data (or most of it) can still be recovered using special hardware and software. This is a last ditch attempt if no
backups exist. However sometimes the disk failure is complete, so you should never rely on disk recovery techniques to get your data back. Solid state drives (SSD) fail completely,
with no way to recover data without very expensive hardware, so backups on systems with SSDs installed are critical.
Test Your Backups
Another tip is to check your backups are actually working. Nothing is worse than to start a restore to find out the backup last ran over a year ago and all your
recent files are gone! One company I attended after their main disk crashed were not worried because they backed up regularly every day. When I went to restore their data after
replacing the disk, I found that the backups had not been running for over two years, due to a hardware failure with their tape drive. They had never tested their backups.
It took them the better part of a month to retype all their data back into the computer.
0419 047 132
Call/text me now or you can email me direct at
maxfieldg84@gmail.com
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