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Some people are just crazy. Before I commence I must say that I usually dislike it when people get preachy on the internet or take a righteous tone. But when it comes to this subject matter I just cant help it, so I apologise in advance! So like I said, some people are just crazy. It's probably just a lack of education but the amount of small businesses and home workers who have absolutely no backup plan whatsoever is really staggering. Recently I visited a business who uses Quickbooks and had a PC issue. Turns out their four year old hard drive had failed and the PC wouldn't boot. He was very concerned about his Quickbooks data, but in the previous twelve months hadn't made a single backup of his data onto a CD, memory stick or external hard drive. Well the drive was screwed but luckily with the help of a couple of data recovery programs we were able to grab his company file. I've been to another business where the hard drive was so toasted no software tool could get anything off it, and it had to go to a dedicated data lab to recover asingle MYOB file. That cost that customer $900, and those labs usually charge double that. Backing up is easy and inexpensive. With a cheap external hard drive, some imaging software such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, and a free basic data copying/scheduling tool (like Cobian Backup) you can be covered for every eventuality. The imaging software lets you replace your hard drive and get your system back to exactly where it was previously in a matter of an hour or so. Cobian lets you immediately access your files from any other PC. Recently Google did a huge experiment, tracking the failure rates of hundreds of thousands of hard drives in data centres. What they found (amongst a lot of other things) is that the average time for a drive to fail was three years. How heavily this drive was used had little effect on the failure rate either. So if your PC is a few years old even if you aren't going to run out and replace your hard drive, at least make sure you have regular, scheduled backups. You only have to learn the hard way once to implement the above. So why not sort it out sooner rather than later. Whilst I appreciate billing all those hours spent trying to recover your data, i'd much rather you were protected and organised so we can focus on the more fun IT stuff like new laptops and stupid YouTube videos. cheers
nathan
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