I have thousands of critically important files on my computer that relate to Perfect Laser (and its associated companies) in some form or other – website data, company letters, machine software and driver packages, specification sheets, manuals, design files, and more. Also, all my personal data accumulated over the years.
I thought I had done enough to safeguard everything by having a separate 1 terabtye drive for my data files – until October 4th. Of course the data on the drive was ok – but I did not have programs to access it.
When I installed a 256 Gb boot SSD some time ago (which provided a massive speed boost over an older regular hard drive), I thought I was clever, and I also created a cloned 256 Gb SSD as a backup – stored in a safe place.
I fell into the trap of complacency.
On the 4th of October, on boot-up for the day, my (HP) PC's motherboard failed spectacularly, taking out the boot SSD with it. Everything that would normally be in the C: drive was gone. After two days of trying everything to recover the drive, I turned to my cloned drive. It booted fine, but then I realised that everything was four years old – yes, the clone was done in December 2020 and I never thought about redoing it.
I headed off to the local computer shop, bought a 500 Gb SSD, and cloned the clone – just in case. Then the process of updating software began. Windows also squealed that it needed an update. Most of the programs I use were so far out of date that it felt like I had to re-install almost everything. Probably the most annoying thing was losing all my emails from December 2020 to the 3rd of October 2024.
Next step was to replace the 1 terabyte spinning drive with a 1 terabyte SSD, and clone it. Then formulate a backup strategy that would not cost an arm and a leg, and would not be too much drama to implement. For my C: drive, I decided that a clone a month would be the answer, as backups of Windows files are never really easy to restore fully. A new 500Gb SSD costs about R600, and that is worth the price to know that I have a recent copy of my programs and data from the C: drive. It may seem like overkill to have an SSD doing nothing, but it certainly does mean more peace of mind.
For my data drive, I settled on a Windows built-in command – Robocopy (Robust File Copy for Windows). Seeing as I cloned the drive already, I did not want to re-clone it that often, but only replace files that have changed. I now run a Robocopy script on a weekly basis that copies only new or changed files for that week (to an old networked PC with the original 1 terabyte drive and another spare 500Gb drive in it).
Of course there are still no guarantees, but I feel that I have been more proactive in taking care of my data. You should think about your setup as well.