Friday 31 July 2009

Backing it up

Ok so recently I have run into a huge mess. Basically losing the entire contents of your computer is a really bad thing, as I not so handily found out a couple of weeks back. First a little background as to what happened:

So I was sat there about to do a job application, talking to friends on msn and steam and all of a sudden the screen froze. Whilst I re-booted the computer I sat there thinking how typical that the computer chose to do this right when I have something important to do. Admittedly if it had been a simple crash then it would not have been a big hassle as Word would have auto saved the file at a previous point but the hassle of having to re-boot your computer (especially with Vista) always takes away valuable time anyway. Well the boot screen loaded up telling me the hard drive was damaged and needed backing up and replacing. Oddly enough the most amusing part of it all was that I couldn't get past the boot up screen as it kept telling me to re-boot the system therefore making me unable to physically back up any data. How annoying. Perhaps in future some sort of device to tell you when your hard drive is about to pack in would come in handy.

I ordered a new hard drive from dabs.com and fitted it and it runs like a dream. The computer is now in the hands of my brother as I patiently await to get my new competition win computer fixed.

I decided to go for the Western Digital 500GB Caviar Black SATA-II with 32MB cache. The drive runs really well. The OS with a few games installed on the computer, Steam and a few other programmes such as anti virus etc boots up pretty fast which is brilliant! Also there is practically no noise coming from the drive which again is perfect. Western Digital drives have clearly developed a little way since the previous Western Digital in the rig before hand which even though it was fairly quiet could still be heard when involved in taxing tasks. It will be interesting to see how the 1TB hard drive I got for my new computer compares to the 500GB and how they run a year from now.

Anyway onto the main section of this post I would seriously recommend backing up all of your data on your computer once every month at least. There are many different methods of backing up data out there including software which will take an image of your drive or my chosen method of just backing up all my documents, music, pictures etc onto an external hard drive.

I would definitely do at least a monthly back up if not a weekly one. It is definitely amazing as to how much data you can lose just after a week of adding files etc to your hard drive.

Anyway I hope this has proven a help to you readers. I am heading off into the glorious sun and heat of Turkey tomorrow evening for two weeks. Hoping to have my replacement graphics card when I get back so I can finally make a start on playing those games again! That and building a website. Amazing how much can be disrupted just by not having your own computer to use.

AJ

6 comments:

M_the_C said...

'Tis indeed annoying when this happens.

Only a few months after I built my computer I got a little lazy whilst trying something in Linux and managed to kill my Windows partition. I don't have much valuable data but losing my save games was very annoying.

I would start backing up but I need to buy another drive.

Have fun on your hols. :)

AJB123644 said...

Ahh that sucks dude! I always hate losing save games but that said I also enjoy starting fresh on games. Especially when I can set the difficulty higher and start things over. There is a way to back up your save game files too but it gets tedious trying to find them all I guess haha!

Thank you. Had a great time by the way!

Anonymous said...

I should do some sort of back up solution myself, I have put the odd thing or two on Windows Sky Drive but if one of my HD goes down at the very least I would have a lot of downloading from Steam to do...

AJB123644 said...

Yes I have had so muhc downloading to do onto my new 1TB hard drive from Steam. Although I like the fact you can download in the background whereas games on discs seem to insist on closing all programs before installing. Which of course is a little inconvenient at times.

Ghost said...

I think we all get a little bit lazy when it comes to backing up our data. And as the saying goes 'you don't know what you've got until its gone' - so true. Any ways, I've just implemented LG N4B2 4 Bay Blu-ray NAS Enclosure to my home office,now i can backup my backups.
Great article, sorry for your loss.

AJB123644 said...

So true Ghost and many thanks for your comment! Luckily I didn't lose too much data.