Backed up lately?
So, is the stuff on your hard drive important to you? How would you feel if it was all suddenly, irretrevably lost? Have you done anything to protect your data?
There I was last week, doing some reading at my desk, when my desktop computer starting making a noise like someone bouncing a golf ball on the tabletop. I tapped the keyboard to wake the computer up to see what was going on, and it wouldn’t respond. I pressed the reset key to restart the computer, and got nothing but a plain grey screen. After various ways of working the problem, it became clear what was wrong - my hard drive had crashed. Utterly, totally gone, with all 12 gigabytes of data. No preliminary symptoms or warnings, no evil virus or deadly attack, just a four-year-old piece of hardware that reached the end of it’s life cycle.
This sounds like a total disaster, of course, and it would be but for one thing - I had virtually everything important backed up. Actually, most of it is backed up twice. I have an external hard drive on my desk, and we have a file server for network backup as well. While it was a mild hassle to install a new hard drive and re-install the necessary applications, it wasn’t all that difficult. (Twenty minutes to put the new hard drive in, and it would have taken less if I hadn’t left the RAM out when I first put it back together. OS X took about 30 minutes to install, and the other major apps took another 45 minutes.)
It always pays to have a disaster plan in place, because it’s not a question of if your computer breaks down, it’s a question of when. How many documents, or pictures, or web bookmarks would you lose? If you have a CD or DVD burner on your computer, take a few minutes each month and record a copy of your most important files. The disks are fairly inexpensive, and certainly cost a lot less than trying to re-create any files that are lost. Then store them somewhere else - it won’t help if you computer is destroyed in a fire if the CDs are destroyed, too.
On a more humorous note, one of my favorite comic strips is Foxtrot. They touched on this topic last week, and you can see the strip at www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2004/04/09/.