Computer Question – Backing Up

Because if some other component other than the hard drive fails (the motherboard, for example), it will be much easier to retrieve your data to another machine.

In addition, your external drive is in a different location than your main machine. A small fire/leak may damage your computer but spare your external drive.

The Wolf

1) It’s easier to port to another computer to restore and / or copy data.

2) If the PC is physically damaged (fire, flood, theft), your backup external drive can be safely elsewhere.

3) Your portable drive can be used for other purposes.

4) Your computer doesn’t have to be opened, HD removed and reinstalled, and new PC configured to get the backup data.

5) External HDs can be quite useful for those who do multimedia editing and need a large amount of swapable storage.

6) Many external HDs can be connected to the router directly and configured to back up critical data for all computers within a household.

Moderator-80-

Based on your comments and replies, it’s quite likely you’re just fine with your current setup.

Portable media is quite cheap nowadays – IIRC, I’ve seen a 2 TB external drive for about $100 recently.

Your computer issue is interesting.

Debugging PC problems can be quite difficult, tedious and frustrating.

Issues can be hardware, software or driver based. That’s not even looking at network issues, and incompatibilities between two items that each work fine on their own.

One word: lightning. Look at the warranty on your surge protector. It specifically excludes lightning strikes to your local electricity network. Ask me. It happens.

So I got a nice roomy external drive. Then one day my air conditioner shorted out and blew the fuse and everything else, including my hard drive. No sweat. Bought a new hard drive, took my external out of the back cupboard and – good to go.

I don’t know how this works with laptops, but of course there’s rain, spilled coffee 😉 curious kids, thieves and all sorts of other good stuff.

Moderator-80-

– booting into safe mode

– booting into command-prompt mode

– booting off of a CD or DVD (CMOS settings may have to be adjusted for this)

[although the system check screen was kind enough to say something about a memory problem, which made things easier]).

– Removing the modem, graphics card and other add-on devices.

– Disconnecting and possibly uninstalling peripheral hardware.

– Disconnect the master drive.

– Look at the device manager for hardware issues.

– Check the event viewer

– Google any error messages (and symptoms)

– Reinstall Windows (without wiping out the current programs).

– Clean reinstall Windows and all programs.

I’ve started from scratch with my laptop PC more than once – most recently I needed to change the CMOS settings to boot from the DVD drive just to get started. My backups are very low-tech; I usually burn a DVD with key data and put it in a (hopefully) safe place.

Was it recoverable?

Reformatable?

Do you know what caused the problem?

Midwest2-

Bezalel-

It isn’t just replacing the equipment. I was in the middle of writing a master’s thesis. Fortunately I had most of the manscript itself backed up on floppies (remember those?) and the rest either in hard copy or on our PC in the lab.

And if I hadn’t had bad experiences with TRS-80’s (the original and very unreliable PC) I wouldn’t have backed up anything and I would have been in for a very stressful time. Never keep anything valuable in only one place. Besides backing it up electronically, if it’s really crucial take the time to run off a hard copy and store it somewhere.

Did you look into online backup? If your data is important and you are worried about concerns of fire/flood in addition to computer crashes and hard drive failure this may be an option for you.

Pricing often starts at under $5 a month for unlimited storage per computer, and you can find discount codes and specials online to give you a month or two free.

The downsides to this method are:

1) Cost – what you would end up paying for 2 months of online backup for a single computer, could buy you an external hard drive that you can use for more than just a single unit.

2) Time – In case disaster strikes and you lose all of your data, the speed of your internet connection could limit the transfer speed of data back on the drive. With a Hard Drive, you could just copy and paste right back on. (You should also note that the initial backup will also take a while, so its recommended you run it overnight)

Personally for important files I use my one of my web hosting plans for storage. I know that I will have access to them wherever I need, and my hosting provider backs up their servers in case they go down…so its a double layer of security for me.