Tuesday 17 November 2009

Back up your hard drive...NOW

Just do it.

Take it from.

Today I lost all the data from my laptop which caught a virus after I borrowed a USB to help print a document.

Silly move.

Of course the work I have written is replacable with a little effort but, as I only backed up a small number of the near 1,000 pictures taken of the little one since his birth, I'm going to be missing lot of baby photos from my son's first year.

I'm not one to be overly sentiment but I was looking forward to going through them with him when he is older. Digital camera and seemingly endless digital storage enables parents to keep all kind of photos and videos of children - something that I can say, at the grand old age of 27, "didn't happen in my day".

This may in fact be music to his ear's as the by spearing him hours of agony as his dad goes through seemingly endless baby snaps which are a little over indulgent for him.

Either way I've learn the hard way and will be investigating back-up options. Expect to read something about that sometime soon.

Ironically I'm working on a cloud computing article, a concept of storing documents online - a concept which leaves documents unaffected by virus on computers.

4 comments:

Mike said...

Hi Jon sorry to hear your bad news. I had heard that flash drives are a great source of viruses here in LOS.

All my data is backed up either online or via USB.

Incidentally do you back up your blog-good insurance I fancy.

Bangkok Blogger said...

You lost the pics ? Have you reformatted the hard drive ? Were the image files corrupted ?

If not you may be able to get a lot of them back. Let me know.

I use the freeware Drive Image XML for backing up my drives to two external drives, its quick, and backups are easy to restore with a Bart PE boot cd. ( which you make yourself. Search google )

There is no need whatsoever to pay $$ for back up software.

john said...

hope you get it sorted out buddy i had my camera stolen before i backed it up a while back pictures of family and friends is hard when you lose them
hope you get the drive sorted

Anonymous said...

Probably too late for you, but maybe a warning to others.
Never use a USB stick that has been in another computer in Thailand, unless you are 120% sure the owner is aware about viruses. I lived near KK university for 3 years. All internet shops, all laptops from students I have encountered have viruses. The most common virus I hace seen was activated as soon as you insert a USB stick. It had something to do with "Autorun". Hope this helps.