I had a call from a friend of a friend of friend the other day, “my PC won’t start, and I understand that you can you help me?”
After arriving at their home and having a look at the PC (running a non-updated version of XP home!) I found that it was not booting from the hard disk. Asking if the user had tried anything to get it working I was met by the usual blank stare! Cutting a long story short, I finally managed to get the PC to boot.
However, much to the PC owners horror, all their graphic images (they run a small wedding photography business) had disappeared from the hard disc. Stating the obvious, I said that at least they could re-load the latest data from their backup… Can you hear the silence?
I’ve worked in IT for many years and it still amazes me how often I hear the the cry of my PC’s broken and I don’t have a back up!!! What is wrong with people? Don’t people care about their data?
With the cost of backup hardware (the DVD writer in your PC ) at an all time low (£16.00 for a LiteOn 20X DVD+/-RW/RAM L/S black drive) and much free software available (ZDNet reviews), know one can say that they can’t afford to make a back up! Of course there are many more options for backing-up/archiving your precious data, that’s not the point of this post, it’s more about YOU making that backup in the first place!!
Moving on from this basic PC house-keeping task is the question of how long will your backup last? It certainly is question that is getting asked quite lot at the moment as more and more of our world becomes ever more Digital!
I found this interesting article on the Daily Telegraph web site that not only talks about backups, but more about the changing standards of digital media and what that means as we need to protect more of our digital data over longer periods as technology evolves.
My PC phone call person? He lost a lot of business and in fact was sued by a number of people for losing their wedding pictures!! However, I do know that he now backs his PC up every day! You’ve been warned!!!
Other reference information of interest.
- Backing up your data, what about restoring it?
- Digital cameras ‘not backed up’ – BBC Article
- Back up your PC – PC Pro Guide
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