Saturday 11 August 2007

Salutary lesson

This morning I had a major problem with corruption on the hard disk that stores most of my data. Almost all the files were lost.

But fortunately (for I am a fortunate man) I had a complete backup on an external disk drive which was last updated just under three weeks ago. Of course I am now kicking myself that I don't back up every week. However, although there will be some inconvenience it is nowhere near as much as it would have been with no backup at all.

The lesson is clear - take regular backups! My solution was to buy an external hard drive and backup onto that. You may prefer to do something different, but please make sure you have some sort of backup.

I salute all my readers who already back-up their files assiduously. This has been a public service announcement for the others. :-)

7 comments:

Elaine said...

Ummm, thanks - it is a month or two since I did a back-up, although most of what I do is recoverable.

A. said...

Now then, this reminds me far too much about work. I give people a regular talking to about this - but it never happens to them, and if it does it's my fault for not reminding them more often - honestly :)

PS. Memory sticks are the quick and easy answer, nowadays they are inexpensive and have huge capacity.

Anonymous said...

Presumably you have a LAN in the practise? Can you not be set up to enter data both to your hard disk and the server, with synchronisation between the two? I'm not an I.T. expert but this is the way we're set up at work...

The Shrink said...

Weekly back up to an external drive of all imporrtant files, in my corner.

After a PC died on me a few years ago I learnt my lesson the hard way!

Anonymous said...

I should think you are talking about home not work since you told us Friday was your last day at work for a while. Most GP practices will be doing daily backups. Which reminds me that many of us are very diligent with work and slipshod at home in all sorts of ways.

BT are advertising some sort of central backup system. I must say I am uneasy that a commercial organisation would hold the entire contents of my computer on their system - nearly as bad as the NHS holding all our information and making it available to all sorts of odds and sods - yes really!

steveg said...

Just did mine this past weekend (says he rather smugly!).

I too have an external Hard drive, but I got the network version, which means that I can connect it via Ethernet to my wireless router and it has now become a fileserver for all computers in the home (as it is a 250Gb drive) - all for a paltry £78.99 too! Worth every penny.

I agree we all don't back up nearly enough - thanks for the reminder

Steve

Ms-Ellisa said...

I back up all the time... I am always afraid that my data will simply vanish overnight or my PC will catch a virus or sth...