The importance of data backup

If you have been thinking of backing up your data do it now!

Its been quite a while since I posted anything here, fact is I had completely forgotten about this blog. It was from the days when I would blog about anything, but the pressures of work were just too much to allow me to even think about writing anything interesting. Since this blog brings back some memories from the past, I recollect an incident that reinforced the idea of always backing up your data. When my laptop crashed with a whole lot of important data that had not been backed up.

Today with all kinds of storage solutions available and prices coming down on a daily basis, its so easy to just store your data in your computer and forget about it, cloud computing is also opening up a totally new avenue of computing. But, I cannot overemphasise the importance of backing up your data.

If you have about 1gb of important data minus the music and the movies, back that up in a dvd or a pendrive and make sure you store them properly in a safe place. The price of a dvd or pendrive is ridiculously cheap now, and if you are not paranoid about privacy you can even store your files in your email as attachments, that way you will always have access to them (provided of course you are connected to the net). Gmail offers more than 7GB of free storage space, download and install a utility named 'gmail drive' this will show up as another drive on 'my computer' and of course you have to be online to be able to download or upload files from this drive.

With 1TB being the standard hard disk on home computers today, there is plenty of room to store anything and everything, but an average home computer user would not have more than 1GB of important data, in the form of word processor documents, spreadsheets, presentations or some other file format. The rest of the space is usually taken up by music, movies and other kinds of multimedia files. Always back up your important files and by important I don't mean music or movies that you can purchase again, but the critical files that would cause you a great deal of trauma and harm if they were lost.

I remember by Toshiba Satellite MX111 with a 40gb hard drive, 256mb ram, running winxp home, I was using this machine to edit a magazine. All the pictures that had been taken and edited were stored in the hard drive and were deleted from the camera, all the articles had been typed from hand written notes or transferred from cds and pendrives and also stored in the same hard drive and the work was almost complete. Those were the days of pagemaker and photoshop and eveyrthing was painstakingly compiled on pagemaker. I remember thinking that I should back up the data just in case, but I shrugged the thought away. Since the work was almost done I decided to take a break and started updating spybot an anti spyware programme I had installed, after a few minutes i remember a friend who was in the office asking me if he should restart the laptop as the update was complete, I told him to go ahead and then I heard him saying that, its not responding, after it failed to respond to all efforts the only obvious solution was to press hard on the power button and do a hard reset, never expecting that it would fail to start. Well that was what it did, then the panic started. The OS had crashed and there were too many system files missing, the recovery dvd that came with the laptop was designed to wipe everything and reinstall a fresh copy of xp which would not serve my purpose at all. To cut a long story short, I worked through the night and finally was able to carve out a 3gb partition from the 40gb hard disk using 'bootit ng' an excellent partitioning utility which I still use today. A fresh copy of windows xp was installed on the new partition which was used to access the files on the other partition and recover the all important unbacked-up files. I cannot explain the anxiety and fear of having lost everything, its definitely something that is to be avoided at all costs.

We've come a long way since xp but an OS will still crash, so if you are reading this, go ahead and backup that data, at least the important ones and save yourself the trauma and hair tearing.