Manually Back Up Your Files or Pay the Price!

Disclaimer: All of my client websites are safe, the server we use for web hosting has an automatic nightly backup that is saved for 30 days. No need to worry about that, no data was lost!

Well I've gone and done it! I've let my guard down and wasn't doing what I am supposed to do. I let my backup routine for my personal hard drive lapse, and now I'm going to have to start over with a completely new hard drive and load all my programs, data and files one by one just to get back to being functional in my day to day job.

I woke up yesterday morning to find my computer wouldn't boot up. It just hung on the bios screen (black screen with all the text that flashes by quickly before the Windows logo pops up). It said it couldn't find my IDE drive. Well I know for a fact I didn't take it out of my computer, it's just not something you remove on a daily basis unless it's broken. But the BIOS says it's not there and sure enough, my computer won't boot up at all.

I managed to grab an old hard drive (the one that started to fail 8 months ago) to plug in for a quick test, and it booted up just fine. So now I have a 3rd hard drive being next day aired from www.newegg.com and hopefully I will be back in full swing by Wednesday.That's 2 hard drive failures in less than a year.

The sad part is, that pristine backup I had from a short time ago using the Seagate backup software that came with the now dead hard drive, won't work with the new WD hard drive I just paid for last night. The Seagate program says "You do not have a Seagate Hard drive installed on your computer so you cannot access this software."

WHAT?! Yep, that's what it said. But I do have a seagate hard drive installed, it's just that it's a piece of junk and it broke 8 months after I purchased it from Best Buy. So now I can't access or use the backup that is saved on my external hard drive? This is nuts!

So now, I will vow to diligently do a manual backup of my files and data each day before I shut down my computer. I highly suggest you do the same, or purchase a software for backups that is not proprietary to a single brand of hard drive.

So what are you doing to protect your files and data on your own computer? What would you do if you lost everything on your hard drive all at once? Every password, email, file, document, image, program etc...?