Back Up Your Hard Drive -- Don't Do as I Do, Do as I Say!

I'm a (semi) techie. I write about information technology. My life revolves around technology. When I travel, my various chargers take up more room than my clothes. Well, certainly than my shoes. We write about data storage and the importance of keeping data secure. And of keeping data, period.

I recently read a good article about backing up data based on the disastrous experience of a tech site columnist. "Back up your data," he advised. Strongly. Good idea, I thought. Did nothing.

So...here I was on St. Patrick's Day eve and my trusty Dell laptop, only two years old, was acting up. Just not responding right. You know, when you live with something every day you *know* when something isn't right. The bond between you and that inanimate object (inanimate? I never think of them as not living) is so strong that any little quiver is significant. Long before any symptoms, as such, show up, you know.

Well, my Dell quivered. I don't worry much about Dells. I've owned probably half a dozen of them and won't buy any other brand of PC. They're not moody. They're able to withstand a decent amount of dropping, jostling, shaking and food invasion. That's why I buy them, among other reasons. So I wasn't overly alarmed.

I rebooted while in the middle of a good chat with someone because it was acting sluggish and I figured two minutes later I'd be chatting with my friend at my usual furious pace.

Wrong-o!

To make a long, painful story short, that was it. I couldn't get past the beautiful blue ("crystal") background pattern on my screen. No access to programs, documents, settings, etc. This couldn't happen to my laptop that my company owns and supports, where they would take it away and bring it back all better. No...this happened to my personal PC, which had all kinds of things on it that are not backed up on our servers at work and that were not duplicated or retrievable from anywhere else.

I (fortunately) paid for Dell's "Gold" service when I ordered my Dell, which meant I could get a live human being on the phone -- at no charge to me -- who would stick with me until the problem is solved. And they're U.S.-based, a rarity these days in tech support.

The diagnosis, after probably two hours of trying everything, was that my partition had crashed. This is like when my trusty (really!) auto mechanic tells me that the solenoid is bad. I don't know what that means but I know it's not good. Well, I was told that I'd have to reinstall the operating system, which meant wiping out whatever was on the hard drive. All my data would be gone!

To make another long story short, I looked into several data recovery services and was given prices from $350 to $2,700. For the same thing. Ugh! How many times have I focused on what's bad about my life and then it's struck me that if we all threw our problems in a huge pile, I'd fight like crazy to get my own back versus anyone else's? All I wanted was "mine back."

Thank God I have a friend who's a true techie, and he has a friend who's techier than he is, and that friend took away my ailing laptop and came back with my critical data on five CDs. I didn't get all of it back, some was just gone (all of my music but it's on my MP3 player, also a Dell, so I could get it back onto my laptop after the OS had been reinstalled...and my saved AOL mail, which, unfortunately, had a lot of phone numbers and other info embedded in it). But pictures, Quicken data, tax data, etc., were all on those precious disks, so I could reinstall and not be totally screwed.

I'm still not "back" totally, but I'm getting there. Lesson learned: back up my hard drive!! So now I have critical data on CDs and thumb drives and intend to buy an external hard drive for backup. Yep, I'm gonna do that. Any day now. Sure.