Property ManagementWhen Your Hard Drive Crashes
My hard drive finally crashed. Why do I say "finally"? Because, as I’ve been
told a thousand times, with a hard drive it is not a question of IF it will
crash; it is simply a question of WHEN.
Yes, kiddies, your hard drive will crash. "Maybe not today, maybe not
tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life," to mimic old Bogie in
Casablanca.
Because I’m on the web driving my drives at racetrack speed for 16 hours a
day, mine wear out faster than most. You’d think I’d learned a lesson after
the earlier TWO crashed in just a year’s time.
See, crashing is no big deal. You just go buy a new hard drive and start
over, right? Not! There’s the small matter of some 10,000 files I had that
may or may not (still) be tediously recovered from the old drive and re-saved
onto the new one.
For me, those files include perhaps a thousand Word documents, 5,000 e-mail
messages stored in browser folders, several hundred images that go to various
web sites, including mine, and nifty little downloaded programs that I might
never find again like the fun "gun.exe." By the time I finished paying for
data recovery, a new hard drive and many days of a technician’s time, the cost
was about $3,300.
What could I have done better? What I knew I should be doing and
exactly what I do now. I now make a recovery disk for my computer every few
days and then save it for the inevitable next crash. But one of those only
lets you restart your computer after something semi-deep and deadly happens.
It won’t save your data from things like corruption.
What I do now that’s even better is to run an internal tape back-up device
(about $270). I just click a button and everything I do is saved. From 50-200
Gigabytes which means that I can save ... well, actually everything on my hard
drive, anytime that I want. So about a year from now, when this hard drive
crashes, I can perhaps save several thousand dollars and be up and running
again in a few hours instead of being without my documents for weeks.
I didn’t lose any clients. Fortunately, one had HIS hard drive crash a few
days before mine. And he works for a big online firm, which made me feel a
little less dumb. Other clients e-mailed back to me many of the current files
we were working on. But what if my clients had instead been the snarly,
"make-wrong" kind? How understanding would your clients be if you could not
find their important files for weeks?
Bottom line? You cannot beat the odds. Your hard drive will crash! Save
money, time, and clients by backing up not just your documents, but everything
on your hard drive, with a tape drive. Read arguments about making tape
backups at
Hewlett-Packard . Or at,
EquipTek Labs. A tape backup drive will, sooner than later, be the best
computer money you ever spent (or saved!)
Also See:
Basic Word and Internet Hints To Stop Your Cursing
Where Rambo/Zena Agents Win the War on the Web
The Web is No Substitute for Shoe Leather