You know when people end up screwing up their system, or suddenly their hard drive decides to die with a horrifying metallic screeching sound, you ask if they have a backup around. Well, in most cases people don’t of course. You can see it when they have this empty glaze in their eyes when they repeat the word. Backup?
Today my PC decided it had been enough, and didn’t respond to the power button any more. Just like that. Now I’ve been taking regular backups of my most precious files on a regular basis, but that doesn’t help me a lot if the power supply turns out dead doesn’t it. Luckily I have this old laptop lying around which can serve as a backup machine. To access my file backup I only have to plug in the removable USB drive I use for that, which is quick and easy, so it only took me about 15 minutes to get back up and running.
Lessons learned from this?
- Don’t ditch an old computer too quickly. It might come in handy when your main machine decides to take a holiday.
- Make sure you can access your file backups easily afterwards.
- Have some way to check what the last time was you took a backup. I have no idea really. Somewhere this weekend was the last run I guess.