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Backups rule OK! Kai Chandler recovers from an acute disk failure after disaster strikes It seems like only yesterday that I was writing smugly about how important it is to backup one’s data files. It all came back to me on Saturday morning as I booted up the PC to be greeted with a message that no boot disk could be found. Suddenly, catastrophically and with no hint of a warning, my 40GB disk had became unusable. There are several tricks one can employ to coax a disk back into life but neither jiggling the connections, transferring it to another machine nor tapping the spindle could bring it back to life. My data was well and truly lost. While waiting for a newer, bigger and faster hard
disk to be delivered, my thoughts turned to how much data I could
recover from my backups.
Luckily, I have a reasonable backup regime. I use Orlogix Backup My PC to backup my data to CD-RW so it didn’t take long to restore the all-important data files to the ‘family’ PC. There’s good news…. The good news is that all my word documents, emails, Quicken, family tree data files, website designs and so on created since time began, well August 1994 anyway, have been successfully restored. And there’s bad news. The bad news is that I hadn’t backed up for eight weeks so had lost everything created since then. It’s actually surprisingly little of value as all my work for Practical PC is emailed to the editor as soon as it is written and I had done little else worth backing up. How often? How often should you backup? It’s all down to the value of your data and how often it changes. Just because I didn’t worry too much about losing eight weeks data, that doesn’t mean that a busy author, accountant or anyone else creating value on the PC can manage with such a lax backup regime. When time is money, regular backup can save a fortune. A few holes to plug Although I’m up and running again, albeit on an alternative PC, a few holes on my backup strategy were exposed by the experience. My practice is to store all my valuable data in subfolders of a Data directory. For example, Word documents will be in C:\Data\Work Documents. I just backup the data directory and all its subfolders onto a single CD-RW disk. That’s all very well for any data stored in the right place but it’s not the whole story. In common with many other journalists I use CiX or Compulink Information Exchange for conferencing. It has an offline reader called Ameol - indeed Ameol is short for ‘a most excellent off line reader’ Ameol has a number of rules – for example to identify incoming emails by sender and store them into folders. I use these rules to store press releases in a Press release folder and regular junk mails get deleted without even being read. Paradoxically, these rules are kept in the Windows Registry rather with Ameol’s data and so were not backed up. After some investigation I’ve since found a utility to copy these rules into my data folder so at least I shouldn’t have to define them a third time. Another set of data that is now lost, never to be recovered, is the contents of the SmartBoard XP extended clipboard. This contained shortcuts to generate answers to frequently asked questions such as ‘what is shareware?’ I’ve now changed the directory where this information is stored so it will be included in future backups. All in all, there wasn’t much lost and I got off lightly. From my experience, I advise you to plan and execute your backup strategy carefully. Most importantly, try to plug the holes before the crash and not, like me, afterwards.
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