Primordial Ooze

Every night at 3am, I backup just about everything on my primary drives to a backup drive. The logic here is that the probability that two hard drives will fail at the same time are next to nothing. Of course, if the physical machine is stolen or damaged by, God forbid, a fire or something, then I lose everything (of course, this is the least of my worries in such an event).

In any case, this nightly automated process just saved my ass!

My machine kind of froze, as one of my applications stopped responding even to logoff and Task Manager “kill process” attempts. I had to power cycle the box.

When I restarted and launched Mozilla Thunderbird (my e-mail client), I was prompted with a dialog reminiscent of a first-time install. My entire e-mail store and profile had been irrevocably corrupted.

No problem. I fired up StompSoft BackupMyPC, found last night’s restore file, selected:

C:\Documents And Settings\nic\Application Data\Thunderbird

in the restoration tree and clicked restore. In seconds, I was reading e-mail again. If it weren’t for my mackup job, and the backup software, I would have been screwed beyond belief. As it was, I was back in business in far shorter time than it takes me to write this blog entry.

The morale of the story is, backup your data or you will suffer the consequences.

I really should burn a dozen or so DVD’s and store these in a fire box, safe, or safety deposit box at my local bank just to be ultra sure.

Also, anothe tip, CD’s and DVD’s  that you burn yourself will only last about 10 years from what I hear. Best to date every disc you burn and when you notice one is about to expire, take advantage of the digital media and make a perfect copy before it becomes  unreadable!

Now playing: The Eagles - Hotel California