Back-Up up your data

You should back up your data on you computer periodically, otherwise you will regret it when you get those ugly errors at the boot up process when the boot partition is not found.

When I started working in this industry of computers, during my first year of internship I got the chance to work with a pesky woman who was the head of the IT department. She put a guy in charge for the daily back-ups for the accounting department server, which he never did. One day the server had a disk failure and went down; though the server was configured with RAID 5 apparently the server had one disk dead from an earlier failure.

The 3 disks were sent to a data recovery Center in Mountain View California costing around 25,000 just for the try but with no luck; it was obvious that the parity could not be recreated with 2 disks dead. The woman and the guy obviously lost their job the next day, and data entry temps were employed to recover the data from hard paper copies the accounting manager had retained for the record. He was a wise man.

From there on I learned how critical it was to properly back-up important data. This applies to users too. It is very important that you keep a copy of all your important documents, music, videos or whatever is   important to you in a back-up medium. The life span of a hard drive is about 5 years, and if you follow my recommendations I wrote in an earlier posts on how to keep the hard drive neat and clean, it can last a little longer but no more than 7 years.

Use CDs DVDs or Flash drives to make back-ups. Now there are huge cheap external hard drives you can buy. Get one and use it as a second storage, but never ever leave all your important documents only on your computer hard drive.