What a fool I have been !!!!
My computer fizzled to a halt a few weeks ago and I handed it over to my local repair shop where he tried to get the old girl up and running again.
Today he tells me it was done for and the hard disc was frazzled.
He said "Just as well you back up your files, huh?"
I began crying at that point as I shook my head. I hadn't backed up my files since the pandemic . . . so dozens of story ideas, drafts and so forth are gone along with thousands of photos, music files and personal records I had gleefully stuck onto the C: Drive without any real thought . . . now gone forever !
My horse has bolted but, friends, make sure your stable doors are firmly closed - back up to an external disc, or the cloud or another PC as regular as you can and keep your software up to date. My crash wasn't due to a virus - just old tech struggling against the increasing power demands of modern computing.
I am told that when Windows 11 arrives ilater this year, a lot of computers and printers will cease operating because their operating systems are not compatible so please don't lose out like I have !!
If you don't see a new story from me for a while . . . blame my old dead Dell !!
Suzi
Comments
I do not particularly like Windows 11
but i can make do on it. Get your new pc. Also backup your files onto a removable solid state drive stick. My Pc has it. Makes backups a breeze.
Sephrena
Such A Silly gurl!
Yea, I'm going to miss some of those stories I was working on - I can remember a couple of set ups but I doubt if I can recreate them scene for scene . . . I had also saved copies of some I had found on-line which I loved and now I cannot recall their titles or authors so they will be lost to me as well !! Its all the saved passwords and security codes I had for websites, payment schemes and so forth that are lost so now I need to start from scratch again and change everything . . . wastes so much time, but its all my fault !!
I'll get there . . there are worse things happening in the world than this for sure !!!
Hugs!!
Suzi
Do *not* use flash for backup
Solid state disks or sticks or memorty cards need to be refreshed every few months. They are not usable as a real backup medium (retention time measured in years or decades), only for recovery after a hardware failure.
Good old magnetic media, no matter whether rotating (hard disk) or moving linear (tape) are good for decades without intervention.
Optical media can range from a year (very cheap CD-R) to decades (CD-R or DVD-R for archival purposes).
A good external drive…….
Is not very expensive at all. I have several - one for my work laptop, one for my personal laptop, and one for the family desktop as well. They are all set up to back up automatically.
I prefer using an external drive to using the cloud, and both of the laptops use a portable external drive so that I can do the backup wherever I am.
The drives themselves are not expensive, and can easily handle a huge amount of data. They are a worthwhile investment.
As far as photos are concerned, I purchased a photo stick for my spouse two years ago so that she can back up the photos on her phone. This can be done through a cloud account, but why pay a monthly fee when she can simply download them onto the photo stick? Plus she can print them from the photo stick as well.
I have seen too many people lose irreplaceable data when it is easy to save it, and an external hard drive has the added advantage of being private as well.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Dum de Dum Dum . . .
Yea, would you believe I had two external drives sat next to the PC ? One was 3/4 full because i used it to back up stuff from the time of the last computer crash in around 2015 but I have gotten complacent in recent years and have left them to gather dust . . . how dumb am I feeling now?! When I picked up my new PC today I fot a 2TB external hard disc to join the ones I already have and I am going to use those blighters like never before . . . but I am doing this too late really !! Its going to use up a lot of my time trying to undo the damage done and I have a lot of other stuff I want to be doing !!! Still, it could be a whole lot worse - I'm still healthy and loving life and thats what is REALLY important !!
Thanks for the advice, Dee, always appreciated!!
Hugs!
Suzi
I am so sorry, Suzi!
Losing stories is hard, but losing the photos is brutal. :(
— Emma
Photos
Well, I think I still have the camera cards here somewhere - I don't tend to scrub them but I know I sometimes have done . . . I know its nothing valuable I have lost - just personal. They mean something to me, and probably nobody else so maybe I need to get a bit of context and just remind myself not to be so careless next time !!
Suzi
Back-up software.
I use a program called Synchredible which is free for non-commercial users. After the first download it just updates any differences and so is very quick. I have 250 mb SSD on my PC which is separate from the 2TB main SSD just as a belt and braces back-up. Then I have a physically tiny 500 mb external SSD which is connected via a USB port for my main back-up.It's very inexpensive and quick and easy to use. You can get huge external SSD in the UK for about £40 so they're pretty cheap.
When I was gainfully employed nearly 30 years ago part of my job involved writing s/w in either various assemblers or 'C' and I always kept 2 back-ups because it was a very time consuming exercise. I was always afraid to have my back-up disc in the main machine without another back-up just in case.
Spinrite
This is a data recovery tool I've had some success with in the past. Don't just run it once and give up, I once ran it continuously for several months and - eventually - I got some the data back.
Good luck...
Alison
Spinrite
I second the recommendation of Spinrite. The guy who created it is one of the best in the business, and his software has saved many hard drives thought lost. I doubt many computer shops will try very hard to save your data unless they are very customer service driven. The effort to payback isn't there. Spinrite might be worth a try considering all you've lost.
> I doubt many computer
> I doubt many computer shops will try very hard to save your data unless they are very customer service driven.
It depends. Also - data recovery (especially from failed drives) requires specialized tools and donor parts.