If your Data is Valuable to you, Back It Up!

Family Tech Support... Yup, It's a A Weekend...

[TL/DR: Backup your data!]

So anyone who's been working in IT, in pretty much any capacity, generally becomes the go-to person for every technical, IT, "fix-this", problem, in the family. So this morning, a family member rocked up with a laptop that needs rescuing...

Over the past 20+years, I've been asked to recommend new purchases, build PCs, configure networks, attach and configure new devices, connect up home entertainment systems (you know, cos I Knows techy stuff), program the VCR... the list just goes on and on. But by far, the most common is: "Please save my Hard Disk!" or variations on that theme.

Now, most often, I do come out of these situations looking like a super hero, and being showered with praise and often, chocolates, too.

But, when hard disks go, they really do go. Not had any issues with Solid State disks, yet, but when your average HDD stops spinning, you're pretty much dead in the water (unless you can afford hundreds of pounds to send it to professionals to do full recovery which is way beyond the budget of your average domestic household IT budget). I used to have some joy resurrecting, briefly, very old ones that were a few hundred Megabytes to a few Gigabytes in capacity - just long enough to salvage the data, prior to casting them into the trash. But today's HDDs (at least in my experience), don't want to play that game. Whether it is due to the enormous amount of data squeezed into them, a change in the way they're manufactured (seriously, this really isn't my field of expertise), I couldn't say.

Prevention is Better than the Cure

Given the pain and unreliability of salvaging a busted hard disk, please backup your data. 

Today, backing up your data may take various forms:

1. You may duplicate data across various devices across the home - may prove a pain.
2. You may use various cloud services from iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive etc - These services may become unavailable due to internet issues.
3. You may use an external Hard Drive with Apple's Time Machine - This drive isn't immune from death.
4. You may use a Network Drive to back up to - This drive isn't immune from death.

There's probably a bunch of others. I generally rely upon a hybrid of 1,2 and 3. I used to have a network drive, but it didn't play well with everything on my network - but they've probably improved since then; so that may be an option.

You only really know the pain of losing data after it has gone - whether it's your final year project that you need to hand in tomorrow; your wedding/children's photos; or that book you were writing... So please be responsible and back it up.