A Precautionary Tale!

[Newportnobby]

When my laptop packed up last Saturday I guess, from the noises it was making, the hard drive had imploded. A visit to the 'pooter doc this morning has confirmed my worst fears, although he will take the drive apart to see if anything can be salvaged.
Like an eejit I haven't run a back up in the last 3-4 months so if he can't get at it, many photos/vids/documents will have gone for ever :'( :'(

Moral of the tale - RUN FREQUENT BACK UPS!!!!

[port perran]

We had a similar problem a few years back and lost some photos and docs.
I now back up regularly !

[Malc]

They say hindsight is 20:20 vision. I schedule a weekly backup on my laptop. Use an external USB drive.

[Tdm]

I have a couple of Verbatim external Hard Drives permanently attached to my Laptop.

One is used for the Windows "File History" back-up,
the other for running monthly partition/File/System back-ups using Easus Todo Back-up s/ware.

Last Back-up I did was end of August - the last W8.1 backup, as on 1st of September I updated to W10, and will probably do a 1st backup of that towards the end of the month when I am happy with it, but I shan't delete the very last W8.1 back-up just in case I need to go back to that Operating System.

I think I got the Verbatim drives in a sale from a well known Market Street Stationery Stores in Chester (not Smiths - one of the others but can't remember the name.).
They weren't dear and one is 500gb, the other 300gb. and come complete with the necessary back-up s/ware.

[Newportnobby]

I have a Seagrove 500gb external drive so haven't lost everything but much has gone unless the hard drive can be accessed. Fingers crossed

[dave d]

Do lots of photos - bores the wife and kids until they need one from yonks ago 
The best idea is to use a separate external, hard drive for ALL those bits and bobs that you hold dear.
Regular and I mean REGULAR (if its new; transfer it!) transfers give you that beautiful sense of calm if and when anything goes wrong.
You may lose a little - always happens - but also don't reformat your memory cards until you actually have to just before you need to use them again.
Ultimate fallback - recovery software: Card Recovery(free if I remember-find on web) or even better RescueProDeluxe. This one costs a little but it really works - will pull back stuff from your card even if you have reformatted. Will not pull back if you have taken shots and overwritten.
Regrettably will not resurrect a deceased hard drive 
No affiliation to either items just a successful user 

[MinZaPint]

Moral of the tale - RUN FREQUENT BACK UPS!!!!

Thanks for the memory jog  Just plugged my backup in 

[Papyrus]

A number of years ago, a friend of mine had what you might call a computer failure... his house was broken into and his computer stolen. It contained the draft of his doctoral thesis... which he hadn't backed up. It haunts him to this day.

Since then, I back up frequently, and always after I have done something I can't afford to lose.

Hope you get a good result, Nobby.

Chris

[Parky]

Having worked in IT for 15 years now there is one adage that has not been covered here that is just as relevant

Your backup is only as good as your last restore !

So do you know you can get stuff off these backups if the need arises ?     

[MikeDunn]

With regards to the stuff I currently hold near & dear - oh yes 

It gets backed up extremely regularly, has occasional copies to another drive as well, and gets different parts checked for usability 

However, what you say is a good query, and one a lot of people will not bother with ...  At some point, I'll see about buying me a NAS box with mirrored disks & then I can start migrating the data into there too    Just keep apps, games & stuff on local & use NAS for all data.

[Newportnobby]

Well it's been confirmed by the 'pooter surgeon that my hard drive has inexplicably decided to self destruct so it looks like I shall have to source either another hard drive or a new laptop :'(
Luckily I think there's a spare Toshiba somewhere in the family and I can restore data/images from about 5 months ago from the Seagrove external drive but quite a bit will be lost. 

[Buzzard]

In addition to regular backups, I use memory sticks for the stuff that changes a lot, it is also advisable to have at least two copies away from where your computer is.  This is in case of the really unthinkable in that your house burns down and the computer and all of your backups go too.  Imagine trying to recover from nothing?

Offsite storage as it's known could be anywhere e.g your desk drawer at work, in fact anywhere will do as long as it's under lock and key and can be got at fairly quickly.  As I've lost data in the past I keep some backups 100 miles away but that's another story.

Another motto is this - you can never have too many backups.  I used to use a rotation of 15 at work and it paid off a couple of times.