Lesson Learned (PC Hardware)

[PanzerMeyer]

If your hard drive is over 5 years old and you keep having to run scandisk to get rid of bad sectors and corrupt files it's time to hurry up and back up your data and buy a new drive. I waited until it was too late so I spent Monday night and most of yesterday reinstalling everything. Reinstalling Windows and then updating Windows, downloading all of my Steam games and then of course reconfiguring everything again. I'm just glad I have a really good broadband connection!

[Softball]

I make backup images of my C drive every 3 months. Ive been lucky since my last crash in 2010. Sucks you had to do that Panzer, but at the same time, it could be a good thing. Did you at least reinstall on an SSD drive?

[PanzerMeyer]

I make backup images of my C drive every 3 months. Ive been lucky since my last crash in 2010. Sucks you had to do that Panzer, but at the same time, it could be a good thing. Did you at least reinstall on an SSD drive?

SSD drives are a bit pricey for me so I just got a 1 TB Western Digital Black.

[Hudson]

Install a second hard drive or get an external drive and use the Windows backup utility to create an image of your drive. Just ensure when you're setting it up that you do check off the option to create an image of your drive. You can even uncheck the options to separately back up your data, though it makes things nice and accessible in case you accidentally delete something, etc.

- It's free.
- It can wake your PC and run it at 3AM if you want to run it automated at weird hours without leaving your computer on.
- It won't back up your drive if your disk is damaged and leave you with a bad image. The only due diligence here is checking once in awhile to ensure the backup is actually running.
- The first backup can take awhile, but it takes volume shadow copies and updates the image from there on and so usually takes just a few minutes to run from then on

If you lose your drive you buy one of equal or greater size, replace the dead disk, boot off the Windows CD and restore the image to the hard drive. It's like you never lost anything. The only PITA I ever had with it is having to detach the backup drive when using an internal afterwards in order to repair the boot sector with the windows CD. Use an external to avoid any such nonsense, or if you can handle unplugging a cable it's not a very big deal since you need to be in there anyway.

I used this approach to save my ex-wife's data twice. Never had a (major) problem.

[PanzerMeyer]

Install a second hard drive or get an external drive and use the Windows backup utility to create an image of your drive. Just ensure when you're setting it up that you do check off the option to create an image of your drive. You can even uncheck the options to separately back up your data, though it makes things nice and accessible in case you accidentally delete something, etc.

- It's free.
- It can wake your PC and run it at 3AM if you want to run it automated at weird hours without leaving your computer on.
- It won't back up your drive if your disk is damaged and leave you with a bad image. The only due diligence here is checking once in awhile to ensure the backup is actually running.
- The first backup can take awhile, but it takes volume shadow copies and updates the image from there on and so usually takes just a few minutes to run from then on

If you lose your drive you buy one of equal or greater size, replace the dead disk, boot off the Windows CD and restore the image to the hard drive. It's like you never lost anything. The only PITA I ever had with it is having to detach the backup drive when using an internal afterwards in order to repair the boot sector with the windows CD. Use an external to avoid any such nonsense, or if you can handle unplugging a cable it's not a very big deal since you need to be in there anyway.

I used this approach to save my ex-wife's data twice. Never had a (major) problem.

Thanks Hudson. Yeah, I will be getting an external drive and will be using the Windows backup util.