Posts Tagged ‘Equipment’
Hard Drive Crash
August 19th, 2009For those of you who have heard me preach about the possibility of a hard drive crash and the steps necessary to protect yourself, you can rest assured that hard drive crashes happen even to the technology guys. Earlier this year, I decided to upgrade my laptop with a removable memory card (like a jump drive/flash drive) to store all of my documents, web site code and other items. This helps me jump from computer to computer by allowing me to pull out the memory card, stick it in my netbook (has anyone not fallen in love with my Dell Mini ?) and away I go.
Well last night, while working on a problem for a customer of course the inevitable happened – my computer froze. When I rebooted windows, the memory card gave me an error mesage about it being corrupt (can you hear my screams – ARRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!). Now for the positive:
Just like I tell you to do, my backups were up to date – the downside was backups run once a day at 1AM – so of course everything I did Tuesday wasn’t in the backup. So first things first, I got myself a new memory card and started restoring my files to it. This morning I have the crashed memory card in our lab attempting to recover yesterday’s work.
So what are the lessons learned from my experience? Here’s the quick list
- Backup, backup, backup (decide if you need twice a day backups even)
- Know your hardware
- Pay attention to little problems before they become big ones (I should have noticed the little things that were happening to the memory card)
- Have a plan (what would you do if your drive crashed – panic, or know that you are prepared).
If you want to talk about the possibility of your drive crashing (no one really wants to talk about it) or you want us to help you build a recovery plan – just drop us an e-mail or call us and I’d be more than happy to help. Here’s to a long hard drive life and no crashes!
