Warning...Warning !

[Sycamore67]

Well, I hope that I got someone's attention.

This morning, my computer burped and would not startup.  It is an older Dell Tower that has been updated with a 2 TB solid state drive and plenty of ram but still running Windows 7.  Anyway, I did a restore and got it up again.  I hooked up one of my 2 TB portable drives and copied all my documents.  

This can happen to any if us.  Please consider backing up or copying all your files to a safe place.  I have read quite a few stories of people losing all their files and feel sorry for them as they could have backed them up.

[rafairchild2]

Always remember:

Two is one... One is none...

I also have a Dell computer with a 2 TB local drive.

I not only back up to my google drive, but also to my "Proton Mail", encrypted drive.  However, I also have a third... local back-up being a portable SD drive that I back up once in a while.

The idea is to have one, "on-site" backup, and two off-site.

Edited July 16, 2023 by rafairchild2

[jellis2]

Thank you

[OCtoolguy]

Thanks for the heads-up Larry. I've had a couple of machines crash over the years but never lost a hard drive. I must have been lucky. I did buy an adapter so that I could plug the old drive into my new machine and gain access to the data on the drive. Most folks experience computer "crashes" and think the machine is junk. They don't realize that over the years, the inside of their box gets loaded with fine dust. If they will take the time to open it up and vac it out and give it a real good cleaning, many times it will come back to life. I have my box sitting where it gets good air flow through it and about every 6 months, I open it up and clean it out. And make sure to clean out the power supply too. That's actually what makes the machine stop. I've never lost data. I did lose a motherboard once but it was under warranty and they gave me a new one. All I had to do was install it.

 

[Joe W.]

On 7/16/2023 at 12:05 PM, rafairchild2 said:

The idea is to have one, "on-site" backup, and two off-site.

A wise man. 
Years ago, I attended a work conference and one of the stories was about a company that had backup copies  at their facility. . . but, unfortunately the place burned down, including the backup copies.  Since then, I periodically make two backup external hard drive copies, and my brother keeps one of them at his place.  The other one is in a fireproof box.
 

[rafairchild2]

4 hours ago, Joe W. said:

A wise man. 
Years ago, I attended a work conference and one of the stories was about a company that had backup copies  at their facility. . . but, unfortunately the place burned down, including the backup copies.  Since then, I periodically make two backup external hard drive copies, and my brother keeps one of them at his place.  The other one is in a fireproof box.
 

I was CIO at a radio network/ youth ministry for 15 years, and the system did daily incremental backups and a full weekly backup. I was there until 2006. This was done on tape and HD.  The daily tapes went into the fire safe, and the officer manager would take the previous night's tape home, so we would not only have the HD backup, but the night's tape in the fire-safe, and then one at her home in her fire safe.  The weekly went off-site and rotated back each week. Just before I left, we were able to use the internet to do our backups off-site, so the tapes became a thing of the past.

Worse case, we would only lose one day of data via the tape method.  Once we went "cloud" and HD, pretty much nothing would be lost.