The value of a backup

Yes, you've heard it all before, "back your data, backup your data, backup your data". It gets old doesn't it? Yet it is invaluable advice. Follow it. Really, just do it.

Late last week my laptop failed to boot up. I was stunned. Just a simple message, "loading PBR 2... Done.". That's it. I just put in a 250 GB drive a few months ago, and wondered if that had something to do with it. Well a little research revealed that the master boot record went corrupt and the stupid thing didn't know what partition the OS was on. Dell in it's infinite wisdom decided its a good idea to put on 3 partitions. Fortunately, I'm a tech and do my own support. No level 1 Dell tech for me, ha ha. After a lot of effort to try and restore this table ( I really didn't relish the idea of a rebuild), I decided to repartition and reinstall Windows XP. And get rid of the extra partitions in the process.

Here's the lesson. I regularly run scripts to do data backups to another PC in my house. While I hadn't ran one for a few weeks, my most important data was safe, as well as 98% of my photographs. Had I not backed stuff up regularly, I would have been hosed. I was able to recover the rest off the drive before I repartitioned. Due to file system corruption, I lost a couple of .msi files for software (ACDSee Pro 2.5 and Media Monkey), but I was able to re-download them, and in the case of ACDSee, contact the vendor for a link. I had my most critical things working in only a couple of hours; checkbook software, Open Office, the stuff that runs my life. Everything else within a day or two. Mostly because its time consuming to install. All I have left is to calibrate my display and a few other tweaks.

I've been meaning to get a terrabyte USB drive for some time now. This incident really emphasized for the need to do it soon.