The joy ofdata backup

The joy of……data back-up

To my horror (and that of the rest of my family) my trusty PC decided to turn up its toes last week and die.

The machine crashed and generated a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) indicating that something serious had happened. In fairness to Windows XP, I think this was only about the 4th time that this had happened since installing XP on this computer (about 18 months ago) and, although I hate to say this, is something of a testimony to the robustness and reliability of the Microsoft platform.

I cycled the power button, expecting the machine to restart, as it has done in the past. Sadly, although the fans roared in to action, very little else did – no BIOS screen and consequently no boot!

I stripped the machine back to the bare minimum of components, just enough to get it running, unplugging all external devices (printer, scanner, USB hub, external hard drive etc) in an attempt to trouble shoot – still nothing. I removed internal expansion cards, including a nice new Matrox graphics card, still……..nothing!!!

Ultimately, after much stress, I decided that the best solution was to buy a minimum of new components which would replace all possible fault points, add a performance increase and yet not cost too much. Consequently, a new motherboard, AMP processor, case and memory was purchased from a local store (I had decided that the pounds saved by buying on-line was not worth the 3-5 day delay in components arriving)

OK, so I had a worrying hour or so when nothing refused to work but after some pedantic trouble shooting, I identified the problem and by 2.30 am in the morning the PC was up, running significantly faster than before (new processor being 50% faster than the old one) and with Windows XP successfully re-registered with Microsoft HQ.

All of my applications were intact so no reinstallations required…HURRAH!!!!

And, because of my paranoia about data, all of my data was intact because of the back-up regime that I have in place.

Windows lives on my C: drive – with a couple of applications. The majority of applications, and data resides on my E: drive and is regularly backed up (every other day) to a large external hard drive using a free piece of software called Cobian Back-up.

Extremely critical data is also backed up to an on-line repository every time it is changed (Thanks Mamut) although I did realise that my emails were out of the back-up loop.

This has now been resolved so all data is backed up and critical data is backed up twice.

Is your data backed-up? Should it be? Ask yourself this -“what would happen if I could not access my data?”

PC could crash, could be stolen or you just may not be able to gain access to it (fire and flood spring to mind as a couple of the risks here)

If the answer is “my business would really suffer” then you really NEED to organise both the physical elements of back-up but also develop a procedure to ensure that the back-up takes place regularly and that critical data is stored away from the master machine.

I was lucky – you may be less so.