The Importance of backing up

Submitted by coius on August 5, 2005 - 4:02pm

I had a customer come to me today, and said that their machine did not boot. After spending 15 Min determing what happened (the machine is hard to get into) I found that the HD died. Before i go into this, My customer was working in a design business and was getting ready to market some stuff. she estimated that she lost about $65,000 worth of design, and time spent on the projects. She never backed up the HD, even though she had a second one in the tower. She used the second one for only music, and only 6 gigs out of the 30GB the HD was. She is really in a mess, as she was about to send in the patents and get them into production.
I had to give her the advice that she needs to backup all the time.
Backing up my data has saved me tons of times (about 8x) and i will not risks losing my data. With HD's getting cheaper, it is easier to backup data now than it was 5yrs ago. This needs to be told to people over and over again. I felt sorry for this person, but she had been told before about backing up. It's sad that you have to lose something valuable before you learn. I'm sorry for the rant, but it seems people aren't following this advice. I have too many costumers in the same situation. And they really have to lose data only once, to realize that this is essential. Parts, as they are mass produced, are having shorter and shorter life spans.
So tell people as much as you can about the importance of backing up.
and don't make the mistake that many people have done.

Submitted by reberto on August 5, 2005 - 4:11pm.

I use my 60 gig iPod photo to back up my iBook and G5. Works great. Not very secure though....

coius's picture

Submitted by coius on August 5, 2005 - 4:19pm.

it's better than nothing
I think my data is backed up onto 4 HD's
all containing the same data. I also have data irreplaceble. There is even an HD in my lock box at the bank that i weekly retrieve to keep a backup of records. This is in the event of a fire. There is no way that all those HD's will fail at once. No matter how bad of a disaster i might have happen to me

note, i backup every day, or every other day. It's not hard to do, just drag and drop.
it is amazing how people fail to catch that there really is nothing to it. and if you backup your whole system, there are programs for free to clone the drive (and even opensource) for all OS's

I asked for permission to open the HD, and I found that the Head arm, had broken completely free from the post. I have no idea how this happen. I am not sure if she dropped the machine. On looking over it, i don't see any scuffs or breaks in the case. The other HD was fine. I had told her 3 times that she needed to backup. She never took my advice. She litterally cried in my office. Somehow i feel guilty, but the decision to do this is not mine. I would love to walk into every house and do this for them. Especially in cases like this.

Submitted by daviqh on August 5, 2005 - 4:20pm.

Also note that their are programs that auto-backup every so often.