My Backup Plan (Learning the hard way)

Just over 2 years ago, I experienced my first PC crash. It was actually a week or so before I started working at Carbonite Australia. Quite a coincidence really. I had a laptop (still have it) but at the time I wasn’t on broadband at home, just dial-up. The laptop was new and I had Windows Vista on it. The laptop also had two hard drives. I specifically asked for this so that I could have more storage.

Wouldn’t you know it Vista kept on crashing so when Windows released their first major update, Service Pack 1, I couldn’t wait to download it. So using my dialup connection I waited a few hours to download it and by that time it was 2 or 3 am. I was too tired to run the installation and so having downloaded it, I shut my machine down. The next morning I went to start it to run the installation and the laptop was dead.

So my first PC crash was entirely my fault. Had I known what to do with my Windows update the error wouldn’t have happened. Luckily enough, the guys at the PC shop that I have purchased my PC through, managed to salvage most of my files (not emails) and they re-imaged the machine. Up until this time, I had never backed up any files on my laptop even though I had two internal drives and an external hard drive.

Then I started working at Carbonite Australia, helping hundreds and hundreds of customers find the best solution for their personal needs and their businesses.

Having experienced by first PC crash, I was conscious of it happening again. I started using my external drive to backup my emails and any docs/pictures that were important. There wasn’t a lot. I probably performed a backup every 2 months. I sounded like most of the customers on the phone.

The challenge I had was that I wasn’t storing much on my PC, so backup although important wasn’t a key concern. After a bit of time at Carbonite however, I started to do work from home as well as train myself on how to build websites. What this meant was that my PC started to slowly accumulate important information that I didn’t want to lose.

The next step in my enlightenment was to begin to also backup using my 2nd internal drive. So this gave me 2 copies of my files.

What then happened was that my PC died again. This time it was some driver going wrong and crashing the laptop. Back to the shop, $50 later they had reimaged the machine and salvaged my files again. No emails, but I had a copy of these anyway.

So in a matter of 12 months with a new laptop running Vista, I had experienced 2 laptop crashes. The trigger for me to invest in Carbonite was that I began to really value the information on my PC. In total I have backed up  2GB of information but it’s made up of hundreds of small images that I use for some of the website I play around with.

For my family photos and videos, I have an external 1TB drive that I use to store them on. I also keep a copy of some photos on my laptop. I also use Carbonite for some of my more precious photos.

So as I have mentioned many times via this blog and via Twitter, Australians need to be educated about why they need to backup and why online backup is by far the easiest option for them.

As a typical PC user, I also had to learn the hard way.