With computers, the bottom line is that you can’t have enough backup. I have learnt this many times over the last 14 years. But I still keep learning it…

On Saturday my daughter was allowed her half hour on my computer to look at kids websites / games. She was on the Danish Radio web site when she called out to me that horrible phrase “Daddy, your screen is all blue”

Upon rebooting, there was a distinct clicking noise coming from the box in the vicinity of the hard disks. “Uh oh” I thought as I tried to remember when I’d last done a thorough backup. I had a long computerless weekend as I waited until Monday for the computer shop to open. I took it in, already knowing deep down that my disk had crashed and that I’d lost whatever I hadn’t backed up. I was guessing about 3 weeks.

I was right. The disk was dead, and while I’d backed up certain things like photos very recently, I hadn’t done a thorough backup for about 3 weeks. Bugger.

So $600 later I’m back up. Why $600? That’s a lot of money. Partly it’s because the shop I used charge like a wounded bull. There’s $250 of labour in that. They charged me $75 just to clone all the contents of my second drive over to a new one (long story but I wanted the data to go on a 500Gb drive and leave 2 x 250GB for the system drive in a Raid Array.) Then there was the cost of a new drive and the cost of Vista, since I decided to upgrade at the same time.

After a day of restoring backups, I have discovered the full extent of the damage. 3 weeks of emails – gone. This is OK considering I have emails on my pc that go back to 1998. 3 weeks is bearable. I haven’t as far as I can see, lost a single image. But I did lose loads of assignments I’d spent almost a week on, and I almost lost a website I was working on (luckily I’d been uploading it to the server as I went).

The moral is this. Don’t be complacent about backups. Even when you are serious about it like me, it’s easy to get caught. For me, it’s mostly the financial burden of setting up the proper architecture. For good backups you need a foolproof, automatic system. Even after $600 I don’t have that, but I’m a step in the right direction.