Thursday, 15 May 2008, a day which I cannot and should not forget. It was the day my office laptop hard disk crashed and in the hard disk are all my office work and personal data since the year 2002, nearly 6 years of data. In that desperate situation, I tried calling a few data recovery companies and their charges surprised me. It was quite expensive considering that I don’t have that much of cash to spend. The first company quoted RM 490 to check the hard disk and to cover the hardware parts plus another RM 2400 to recover data. The second company said that their initial hard disk checking will be free and then they will quote a price ranging from RM 800 to RM 1400. So I decided not to recover the data now as I realize I can still survive, although it was a bit hard. I will send the hard disk for data recovery services when I have the money.

Today is Thursday,  22 May 2008, a week after the disaster struck me. I registered my own domain name PrajishSankar.com and started a blog. And this is my first post in my blog “Backup your important hard disk data now! Or risk losing your data.. as I lost mine.“.

I have started to strategize backup plan and procedures since the day my hard disk failed. This time I have to make sure that I am not at the mercy of hardware failures!

These are what I planned to do as part of my “undestructible” backup strategies:

  • Use online document, spreadsheet and presentation software services and store the files I created online (I do not need Microsoft Office installed, unless I want very advanced features).
  • Use data backup/replicating software which duplicates files and folder to multiple computers over the internet automatically.
  • Use web mail interface instead of downloading all my emails to my computer.
  • Download the latest copy of all the files stored online to my computer and store them in an external hard disk, done once in two weeks.

I will write more details of my backup plan in other posts so that you can try them yourself.


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