From now on, I will back up my work...

I will back up my work, I will back up my work

[edit_g]

Just before departing on holiday I found that my computer was having problems. It would get to the xp "loading windows" page and then restart... It would get there again, and then restart again. Starting in safe mode produced the exact same results. I had a small fit, picked up my bags and left for a skiing holiday.

I came back 10 days later and I thought that the problem might have automatically fixed itself... Of course it hadn't... Further investigation revealed that the majority of sectors on my HD had been somehow corrupted (still don't know how!). Clean install of XP Pro and format the HD... The pain... The pain!

Now I've lost all work for clients, all my digital photos, all my MP3's and all my app's and drivers will have to be re-installed.

I will back up my work. I will back up my work. If you don't already - consider my tale of woe - and back up all your work.

[vibgyor79]

all my MP3's

I understand your pain!

For me, my emails are extremely important. And I generally backup all the mails (.pst files) on to a CD Rewritable disk every month.

If this is a pain, you should atleast keep another copy of your important files in a different partition.

[WibbleWobble]

If this is a pain, you should atleast keep another copy of your important files in a different partition.

Keep them on a different drive altogether, if the actual drive fails (Hi IBM!) then partitions are of little use.

[PaulPaul]

If you can, put a backup on a different computer in the network.

[sun818]

Get a RAID controller and set up a mirror. You get double the read performance and equal write performance. Buy a spare third hard drive of the same model as a spare. If one of your hard drives ever dies, swap it out with the replacement and you're good to go. You can't go back to a previous version of your web page, letter, or image so backups are still a good idea for those situations.

[TheDave]

Paul, backing them up to a seperate computer on the network isn't the best solution. This was the way we used to operate until our business had a fire, and although we had a lot of stuff backed up on CD (which just happened to be out of the building, thank god), I personally lost a heap (thousands) of original digital photos (I still have various resampled versions), design work which was done outside our normal systems (which takes the longest) and ALL my futurama episodes (love that show, losing these killed me the most..)

Now everything is backed up every day to a removable HD in a RAID array, which is stored safely each night.