If you’re in the middle of your semester and use your computer to take notes and do other work for school, you should be backing up your data. There’s nothing worse than losing all the work you’ve done because your computer crashes.
It’s late Saturday night. I’ve just completed a hugely productive period of work on some Journal editing. 7 hours in all between bluesheet editing and article revisions. I save all my stuff and open up my Google Reader to catch up on some news (okay, and gossip) before heading to bed. Then, all of sudden nothing. My computer shuts down. Screen is black. No noise coming from the computer. Nothing. Hit the power button. Nothing. Put the startup disk in and try to boot from that. Nothing. I try all the tricks I can find online – reset the SMU. Nothing. Reset the NVRAM. Nothing.
I had backed everything up about a month earlier. But since then I’ve done a ton of note-taking, journal editing, comment writing, and even a little outlining. While the tech guys are trying to recover that data, there’s a decent chance that it’s all lost (4 weeks of class notes, roughly 40 hours of journal work, approximately 25 footnotes and countless revisions on my own journal note). Until I figure that out, it’s old school – pen and paper!
The moral of the story is: invest in a good external hard drive and back up your stuff regularly. Here’s a good place to start your search for a backup drive. Once a week, once every two weeks, once per month, whatever makes sense. It will payoff in the long run, particularly if your computer dies, gets stolen, is infected by a virus, breaks when you drop it, short circuits from a little starbucks accident, or, well, you get the idea.
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5 Responses to Back Up Your Data
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I use IDrive (http://www.idrive.com/index.html). It’s an online backup site. You download the software to your computer, you get 2GB for free ($4.95/mo or $49.50/yr for 150GB), and it automatically backs up your computer every day as long as you have internet connection. You can also set it up to do continuous backup where if you make a change to a document or add a new document, it will automatically back it up. Then, if you need a copy of something, you just use the software to get a saved copy or go to your online portal.
I use a western digital external storage device. 1TB of storage space with USB and Firewire800 transfer capability. The device comes with backup software that works with my Mac. I try to back up every time I add significant work to my computer, be it school work, family photos, etc. If it is really important, like my Law Review Comment I am working on, I upload a copy to Google Docs immediately after doing significant writing, and I backup a copy to a flash drive.
I hope you recover your data. Good Luck.
I have a Lacie d2 Quadra 500GB external drive. I’m pleased with it. The timing of this crash was just unfortunate, though I’m going to increase the frequency of my backups to weekly again.
Just got off the phone with the Apple Store. It looks like they were able to recover all of my data. The computer still needs to be fixed and will shipped off to the Repair Center for that. I’ll believe that my data’s safe when I have the computer in hand, but it’s looking good right now.
Dropbox, people. Dropbox.
Thanks for the reminder Sherpa, I need to go do this now actually. And I’m a Comp Sci grad who shouldn’t need reminding >_<