Your HDD is dying - have you backed up?

After all the hassle and wasted time of viruses on 2 computers, I sat down to catch up on a mountain of jobs.

I turned on the computer and "pphht" - accompanied by a burning smell. Uh oh - not good.

After some elimination, I realised it was the Maxtor HDD. It was still under waranty so I took it over to see what they could do. He proceeded to swap my dead one for a new one. But I needed all the data off that old drive - so I protested.

He recommended some data recovery places and said I could swap the drive after they had tried to recover the info. The data recovery place got $50 from me to take a look. They spent 4 days trying their best but he contacted me to say the HDD was completely dead and he couldn't recover anything.

Sigh - back to Maxtor for the replacement and I had to start the long process of reinstalling the OS, programs and data. Was I backed up? Yes, but not as well as I would have liked - I'm missing some stuff.

So, backup has gone to the top of my agenda again (it was always up there but had slipped because everything had been running so reliably).

I now have a daily backup of my 2 blogs emailed to me. I have a weekly backup of all files on the PC. And next, I'm going to ghost my hard drive - it is too much hassle setting up from scratch.

Have you backed up lately...?

See the 1 Comment below.