Well, my desktop PC was working a week ago, though the connection to the Net was dead. (Someone apparently cut the LAN cable during the renovations in the building where my office is located.)
But last week I went in to print some files, and discovered that, all of a sudden, the damned thing was refusing to boot up. Some kind of hal.dll file in the System32 folder is ganked, and I haven’t been able to make it work again. The recovery CD and boot CD aren’t working. I’m getting close to the point where I’ll have to sigh and just format the hard drive, which ain’t something I want to do, but… well, when you have no choice…
Argh. Always back up your data. It’s not that I haven’t learned the lesson, it’s just that, you know, you get busy, and don’t keep up, and then bam, one day: catastrophic failure hits. But I won’t format the drive till I know it’s non-recoverable. I’ll diddle for a while first, at least. You never know what I might pull off.
Especially with tips like these…
I had years of good backup intentions (and a couple of hardware failures along the way), which finally produced fruit earlier this year.
Regular Lifehacker reading finally got me going, and I had a couple of months of good backups before my computer died last week.
Once you’re back up, don’t put it off.
I wasn’t looking for it, but not 15 minutes later I ran across The Tao of Backup.
Thanks for the reminder — I’ve got the external drive starting a backup now.
Ha. Not having such a thing, I rely on a variety of backup methods, all of which I neglected over the past year. Luckily, I managed to make the PC barf up most of the files it had, so all’s well that ends well… at least, once I get the files onto my MP3, which I’ll have to do after I clear off my MP3 player, while I’ll have to do once I’ve backed up my laptop hard drive. But that’s a job for this afternoon…