Last week I installing some OSes to decide which one would stay (in the end it was Windows XP) in my desktop, and I accidently formatted the Storage Partition. The important stuff was replicated in my macbook, so I didn’t lost anything I can’t download again. But this has alarmed me to worry more about backups.
I was booting up the desktop after 2 months (in which I was kind of banned form the basement1) and it was making a louder noise than before. I opened it up and checked that the dissipator was full with dust, so much that is was black! And the computer is only one year and half old! So i removed it and cleaned it. I noticed that the thermal compound wasn’t that good when I remounted it. I booted the computer and it would shutdown after 1 minute because of processor overheat2. So without a working desktop, I got worried about backups again and I decided to buy a NetStore.
I ended up buing a MyBook World Edition 500Gb which also has a funny story that you should also read. When I was getting ready to backup stuff to the external drive, my macbook wouldn’t boot! The screen was gray with a darker apple logo and a AJAX-like spinner that would never end! Verbose mode gave me no idea on what was going on. A few more reboots with cmd+V, and nothing. I inserted the Leopard CD, opened Disk Utility and found out that it would recognize my harddrive, but no partition. No backups could be done then :S
From the nowhere the next boot succeeded and I am right now backing up all my stuff to the external disk. But I’m not sure if It will reboot next time…
Ironic how both of my computers died on me right before I was backing up. This should teach you something right? If you don’t have a secure backup plan, do it right now! the 79€ a 500GB drive cost will be nothing compared to how much you will lose if your single drive fails.
I suggest you make daily backups of your most important folders (SyncToy in Windows, rsync in everything else) and weekly backups of your system. When I got my workflow perfect, I will post about it.
1 Have you noticed that all great genius work in a basement?
2 I later bought a thermal compound kit and applied it, but no luck. I guess I’ll take the computer to MBit.