Thursday, December 14, 2006

Keeping Your Personal Data Safe During a Crash

A long time ago my hard drive crashed and i thought i had lost everything. I was lucky enough to get my hands on some awesome software to get the data off of my one hard drive after i did a minimum install of the OS (xp home). I was extremely relieved that my kids pictures of them from the past 3 years (since they were born) as well as some wedding pics were all safely recovered. Ever since then my data has been safe.

[More after jump]

How do I do it? Quite simple actually, thanks to my old cube mate: just have 2 hard drives. On my master hard drive disc (hdd), i have the operating system in all it's flawed glory (160 Gigs). On my second hdd i have all of my personal files such as my old "My Documents" folder from the crashed hdd, pics, tunes and other material that i would be lost without if i were to loose it.

now, if my master hdd crashes again or gets "FUBAR'ed", i don't care. there is nothing on my master drive that i care about. any programs or add-ons that are on there would not be life threatening if i lost them. and i could just go download all of them again. I just have all of my torrent downloads, digital pics, and anything else go right to my secondary hdd.

If my master hdd is messed up beyond all repair i also have linux on a stick. so if, for any reason at any time, i am left without my master hdd, i just pop in the usb stick and boot from it. Until i get my master hdd fixed/replaced i just use linux off of the usb memory stick.

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