Well, I’m on the laptop for the night. After a recent reorganization of my desktop hard drive space, my data drive has apparently failed. I had taken out two drives from a NAS and incorporated them into my desktop. That was a bad idea, I guess.
According to the Windows event viewer, it could be the drive controller or the drives. So I’m going to swap them all out with up-to-date hardware tomorrow. The plan is to get drives twice as large, then mirror them with hardware RAID. One part of the plan is not to buy Seagate drives. I never liked the ones I had. Always spinning down and clicking on spin-up.
Then, after hardware installation, I restore. And that’s the point of this post. I’m annoyed, a little inconvenienced, but I’m not freaking out, not even really worried. Why? Because I have a backup. And you should too. They say that people only ever lose their data once, then they learn their lesson. I learned mine a while ago and now, it’s paying me back.
This time, I’m using Windows 8’s File History, so it will be interesting to see how it works for restore. Of course, I’m hoping I won’t have to use it at all and I can copy my data off the old drives, but having that safety net of backup is beyond wonderful.
So, like you hear PSAs all the time about having a fire plan, a hurricane plan, a retirement plan, a rainy-day savings plan… here’s your PSA for having a backup plan. It’s damn simple. Buy an external hard drive – they’re so cheap and everyone has them for sale. You can probably buy one at a grocery store. Plug it in and do a backup. Windows 7 and probably 8 will even detect when you plug in a drive you’ve dedicated to backups and start going to town.
Do it.
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