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Hard Drive Failure: Are You Prepared?
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | January 2, 2008
The New Year greeted my by having my main internal hard drive fail on New Year’s Eve. I spent a lot of New Year’s Day installing Windows on a new hard drive, installing programs, etc, but it all went smoothly.
Are YOU prepared for your hard drive to crash?
Any time your computer is broken is time you can’t work on your business. Here are some tips to stay ahead of the game:
1) Regularly back up your crucial data - All my website files, word documents, email correspondence, video and audio creations, etc, are backed up to an external hard drive daily. I use Second Copy for daily backup. If you’re not backing up your data regularly, you’re insane. (And yeah, lots of people don’t.)
2) Have installation disks on-hand to reinstall your operating system and drivers. These days some computer sellers skimp and just include a backup of your operating system in a hidden directory installed on your hard drive. That will help if you just need to reinstall Windows from scratch, but if your hard drive fails completely, it won’t do you any good. You need reinstallation disks on-hand.
Getting drivers for your peripherals reinstalled can be a huge pain. Important tip: Download “Driver Magician Lite” and run it, it finds your currently installed drivers on your computer and backs them up for you to burn to CD or keep on an external hard drive. That way you’ve got your drivers all in one place ready to reinstall ahead of time. (DO IT!)
3) With the risk of viruses and spyware always present, you’ve got to be protected. My personal method is to run software that lets me “roll back” my computer to a previous state if there’s a problem. In other words, my computer could be infected with the worst virus possible, and I can just reboot to a time before my computer got the virus and I’m ready to work 2 minutes later. One such software program is Rollback RX, and there are other competing programs.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, and you want to have your main hard drive running “lean and mean” without extra junk you’ll be deleting later before you install it… The reason being, that Rollback has to keep track of previous states of your computer, so if you installed it and then deleted a 50 GB file, Rollback would still keep that 50 GB file stored in it’s previous “snapshop” state in case you wanted to revert back to it.
Protect yourself against data loss and computer problems, and have a great year!
Topics: Cool Tools | Trackback URL