Mummy … my hard drive crashed !!

 

In my previous article, I had covered some tips on shock-proofing ourselves against the loss of  our mobile phones. In this article, we shall look at some tips to ensure that when the hard-drive of your laptop / PC crashes, the loss is only of a computing resource and not of your data.

 

1) The best solution is to have a robust backup mechanism. Some ways to ensure this is

 

a) Have an External hard drive and ensure that a backup software is implemented to take an automatic backup on a daily basis of all the data files. Some “freeware” / “open source” backup software that you may check out are Easeus Todo Backup, Paragon Backup and Recovery and FBackup (all of these are available on CNET).

 

b) Currently there are quite a few service offerings on the net which allows you to backup your files on the net and also allow you to synchronise the files across multiple computers. Some such service offerings are Dropbox (www.dropbox.com), Syncplicity (www.syncplicity.com), Sugar Sync (www.sugarsync.com) and Microsoft Live Mesh (www.mesh.com)

 

2) Another good practice is to activate the “System Restore” feature of Windows. The System Restore program takes a “snapshot” of Windows XP’s key internal settings and saves them by date, known as a “Restore Point”. When Windows XP is behaving badly on your system, call up System Restore, and tell it to return to a Restore Point when everything was working correctly.

 

Since everything System Restore does is reversible, there’s rarely much to lose in giving it a try. System Restore won’t delete any documents, e-mails, or other data files. The files you created yesterday will still be there, even if you use a Restore Point from last month. Since System Restore only deals with Windows XP’s settings, it only helps with Windows XP itself. It can’t help you locate deleted e-mails or recover deleted files that are no longer in the Recycle Bin. Using System Restore to “go back in time” won’t disinfect your computer of a newly acquired virus, unfortunately.

 

3) Another good practice would be to ensure that you do not store any data files on the “C” drive –  that is the drive on which the Operating System is installed. Thus even if you have to format your “c” drive and reinstall the OS, there wouldn’t be a data loss.

 

4) An issue that a crash-survivor faces is the non-availability of the required drivers after reinstallation of the OS. A good practice is to take a snapshot of available drivers at periodical intervals using a driver backup utility like DriverBackup (open source available at sourceforge) or shareware tools like DriverMagician, Driver Genius, DriverMax, etc.

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