Some lessons were meant to be learned the hard way. Thank god this one was not one of them... But consider the irony (even humor) in what happened...
Last week my wife's colleague Paul called me. "I heard you are good with computers, I need you help." he said. He explained to me how the day before he was at home trying to turn on his computer, and as he touched the power button, a jolt of static jumped between his finger and the PC. And nothing. The machine would try to boot, but after a second just died again. And again. Kaput.
You can imagine, Paul was devastated. Who wouldn't be? As with most of us, the first thing he was worried about were all the family pictures. He didn't even have the heart to tell his wife that everything may be gone up in one little spark. As he described the symptoms over the phone, my first guess was the motherboard was fried by the static electricity; I didn't think his hard drive with all the data was affected. Fortunately for him (and his marriage), that turned out to be the case.
This morning, as I was going through my regular routine turning on my computer and preparing a nice hot cup of coffee, I noticed something strange on one of my screens, a boot message I had not seen before, telling me something about primary and secondary boot failure on my system.
"Boot sequence halted" it said in big gray letters on the black background. My heart stopped. Here I was telling Paul about different options to protect your machine and back up all the data, while all my work from yesterday - tons of writing I did - was not backed up at all! Stupid! Dumb! And I have a secondary disk, a thumb drive and a burner - plenty of options, thank you very much, but I was just too tired last night - OK, lazy really, to move one folder - ONE STUPID FOLDER, drag and drop, that was all!
Well, the good gods of computer hardware smiled on me this time, it turned out to be nothing more than a CMOS battery, that keeps the critical hardware data about the computer on the motherboard.
My lesson: back up, back up, back up. Your clients, letters, financial data, pictures. Back up everything. Here are some of the options you have:
- Thumb drive. Also known and USB drive. Cheap, easy to transport, pretty good capacity.
- Burner. Lots of storage, especially on a DVD format. Easy to store, portable.
- Secondary drive. A bit complicated to install, pricey. Can be set up with an automatic backup program. Great backup if the primary disk fails.
- On-line backup. Great if your entire system is destroyed. Can be accessed from anywhere. Several free and paid services available.
One more piece of software that can come in handy is database indexer: It quickly scans your back up disk and creates a data entry in it's database. This way you can quickly search and locate any archive. I use Advanced Disk Catalog, and there are plenty of others available.
OK, my heart rate is back to normal, everything is backed up, time to relax and enjoy that cup of coffee.
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