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Mike Null
10-26-2006, 7:41 AM
A word to the wise----

One of my customers had his computer crash and material on his hard drive can't be retrieved. That's his financial files, customer lists, art files and web site files. He had no backup.

He's now trying to reconstruct everything but so much has been lost he won't be able to replace it.

A cd or dvd backup once a once a month or so could save you a lot of grief.

Ed Lang
10-26-2006, 7:48 AM
Good advise Mike.

I try and keep a good backup of my files and do it two different ways. First, I have a USB hard disk that is connected to a little LinkSys device that make it a network storage unit. Then all three computers have access and can share files that way as well. Second is a stand alone USB hard drive that I take from machine to machine and backup files. Then this drive gets put away, off line.

Now that I have said all of this, I need to make a backup soon!

Ed

Mitchell Andrus
10-26-2006, 8:47 AM
Ed, good advise. Keep the backup drive 'off line' - physically unplugged. Viruses can wipe out an external drive rendering any backup efforts moot.

Mitch

Daryl Barberousse
10-26-2006, 9:06 AM
This situation happened to my computer recently. Fortunately, they were able to retrieve all my information. I now have an external USB hard drive....costs a little over $100. I download once a week.

Joe Pelonio
10-26-2006, 11:58 AM
That's funny, last night I had about 10 minutes to spare before closing and didn't want to start anything, so I ran a backup on the laser job files onto a CD. Hadn't done it in months. Then I come in and see this post.
Good reminder for all of us.

Thomas Hempleman
10-28-2006, 3:37 PM
Another suggestion is to make a backup and store it off-site. Even a home computer should have an off-site backup if it is storing important info. A family I know lost their house (and computer) to a tornado. Even though they made a backup of their computer data on floppy diskettes, that backup flew away with the rest of the house when the wind hit. I make a complete system backup of my entire computer onto a portable USB hard drive every six months. That drive immediately gets stored in a friend's house 3 miles away. And every afternoon, my data files are copied onto a 2 GB USB flash drive that is the size of a pack of chewing gum. I store the drive in my truck (I figure it's safe there because my old Ford truck is darn near indestructible!). The important thing is to keep the backup at a location that probably won't be destroyed along with your computer.

More than once I've gone back to the data backup to restore a file that my clumsy fingers have accidentally deleted. And the full system backup was a life saver when my hard drive crashed a few years ago.

Phil Thien
10-28-2006, 10:19 PM
Woodworking is my hobby. Data recovery is my business. I can do cavity work (stack swaps, etc.), and logic jobs. Happy to provide references. Fixed fee of $500. No charge if nothing recovered.

phil@cgallery.com.

-Phil