Backups, backups, backups...

As many of you know, I'm a computer maniac. I have been ever since the 6th grade when I got into my first 1 day a week advanced computer class and got my first computer, an IBM PC jr. I've moved on thru many computers since then, most of them put together by myself so that I can the exact specifications that I wanted (and reuse some parts from the previous one, etc).

As I moved on to college, I got my degree in computer science, and my only job post-graduation has been as a computer programmer for Sprint. As you can tell, it is my life. Well, I had my first almost catastrophe this weekend. I went to startup my computer and it gave me a windows error immediately. As much as I despise the evil empire that is Microsoft, there isn't much else out there. No biggie, I've worked around many an annoying windows error. After a couple of more reboots and the same error, I rested for the night and waited till Saturday to pull out my windows install CD to try and do a recover.

That's when panic set it. The windows recovery console couldn't read my C drive. It was giving me system failure. Next, being the technomaniac I am, I pulled the harddrive out and put it in an external USB case that I had to try and read the drive from my work laptop. The drive just clicked a few times over and over. I was not happy. Finally, it came up and it could read one section of my drive and not the other. The problem is it couldn't read the main section.... Not Good, but not horrible. At least I could read something so I know that the entire harddrive itself hadn't failed, just a small (but very important) part of it.

See, there are lots of things on that missing main section. Our recent digital pictures being the main thing (Once every 4-5 months we gather enough data to burn a DVD, and I also move them off to a spare drive). I hadn't backed up my pictures since July. Next, was my quicken and tax data... hadn't backed that up in about 15 months (been 4 years for my turbo tax files). Then there was some digital scrapbooking that jen had done, other various files, etc.

That hard drive casing I used above normally contained a fairly large harddrive that I used to back up data too... however, on Saturday I realized that I had been much more diligent in backing up stuff from my work PC then I had from my home PC. Life was not good. Emma and I packed up the harddrive and headed down to some local tech place called Data Doctors. I picked them because I figured they would specialize on this type of thing. They said they could see my data on my messed up portion of the drive and they could rebuild it, file by file, in a couple of days and get it back to me. The problem was a corrupt partition table which tells windows what section of the harddrive is the main part and what is the second part. It would be costly though...

I'm now impatiently waiting to find out the results. Hopefully, I will have a handful of burned DVDs with all my data on it from my messed up drive. The morale of this story is BACKUP YOUR PC but also do it often. It would've taken me hours to rebuild my quicken data, not to mention all the lost memories of pictures from the last 4 months.

It still looks like I get to re-install my PC with a new harddrive though, including Microsoft and all the needed apps. Oh well, life goes on.