Many Hard Disk Crash Cases. Are You Ready?

My clients reported a fair bit of hard disk crash cases during last few weeks. So I thought of providing some useful data protection tips on this issue of the newsletter.

You must always be ready for a sudden hard disk failure. Follow these steps and make yourself ready.

1. Take daily backups. Here are tips to do it quickly.

Data backup is like an insurance policy. You cannot buy it when you want to use it. You need to get it in advance to use it. Still 90% of the home Computer users are not taking regular data backups.

Do you know why most people are not taking backups? Because their data is everywhere on the hard disk and it takes multiple copy/pastes attempts to complete a backup. Therefore the solution is to organize your data.

Keep all your important files under one main folder. This includes your documents, spreadsheets, movies, images, emails (personal folders) and everything that you cannot afford to loose.

For an example I have created a folder called DOCS (C:\DOCS) and all my important documents are under sub-folders of the DOCS folder. Therefore I have to backup only the DOCS folder, which is very easy.

Always take backups to an external media such as a USB stick, external hard drive or on a writable CD. A good practice is to create 7 folders for seven days in the backup media and take backups to the appropriate backup folder depending on the day of the week.

I.e. If you are taking a backup on a Monday then the data to be copied to the Monday folder of the external media.

Add a daily task in your email calendar to remind you to take a backup.

2. Keep a good data recovery software with you.

Taking backups is a must. Apart from that you can keep a good data recovery software to use in a hard disk crash situation. We use Stellar Windows Data Recovery Professional edition. Visit best Windows data recovery tool page to read my review of this software.

In the next newsletter I am going to introduce a Computer repair expert and his DIY Computer repair eBook. This is one of the best computer maintenance and repair books I have ever seen. I have been trying to get a very special price for my newsletter subscribers. Will let you know in the next issue of Computer Tips.