You've heard it time and time again... back up your computer!! Being a computer geek, I can't even count how many times I've run across situations where a full backup would have saved hours of labor and/or the loss of precious data (work documents, family photos and so forth). Following my own advice has just saved my bacon.
Yesterday, when I got home from work, I discovered that my internet browsers just wouldn't work on the family PC. We use Firefox as the main browser, but I also understand that sometimes Internet Explorer needs to be used. For whatever reason, both absolutely failed to work as expected. I spent the entire evening trying to get things to work, all to no avail. Eventually, I gave up and went to bed.
This morning, I figured that I'd start fresh. I did a clean backup of my family's documents and settings, so nobody would lose that precious picture, wiped the drive, and installed Windows from scratch. That's where my backups -- yes, multiple backups -- came in handy. Instead of having to reinstall everything from scratch after my new Windows installation, I simply restored from backup. And fortunately for me, I had two full system backups, because my most recent one choked. Luckily, the older one worked. In fact, I'm typing on the once-crashed computer while restoring the documents and settings that I backed up earlier this morning.
Yeah, I will have to re-run a couple of months worth of updates, but in the grand scheme of things, it couldn't have worked out much better... it's a kid-free weekend, and the wife is out of town on business. I will have spent several hours fixing things, but when the wife or kids next log on to the computer, they will find it exactly as they left it... and THAT is why I take the effort to back up my PC.
As you can imagine, once I have the PC back to how I want it, the FIRST thing I will do is a full backup.
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3 comments:
Lucky has nothing to do with it- you were SMART....Paul tells everyone all the time to back-up....I'm glad I have him to do it for me tho.
When that stuff is finished- you should pull out the bike and go for a ride....it's 75 here today and GORGEOUS!!!! If only I didn't have to sleep all weekend in the day time and work at night.......and mark my words, NEXT weekend when I have time off- it'll probably be cold and rainy again.
Keep your fingers crossed the weather holds for me too!!!!
Going for a ride would have been an uncomfortable endeavor. It snowed here last night, and only got up to about 45 degrees.
Fortunately though, the PC is back to where it should be, and I'm doing a backup now.
Unfortunately, I have no real backup system in place. All I have is an extra copy of the absolute essentials on a second internal drive. The only way I could do a full backup is backing up to DVDs, and for that I'd need about a hundred and ten of them.
What I really need is a 500gig external drive, but that's out of my price range at the moment.
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