I thought of putting this post in the computer forum but decided to pop it in here instead so that more of you will have a chance to read it. As you all know I have recently had to buy a new computer as my other one literally 'died' on me. I was foolish enough to think that it would keep running forever and that everything I had stored on it would be there for me whenever I wanted to get hold of it. How wrong was I? VERY, VERY wrong. I hadn't even given a thought to making back-up discs for well over two years. Now I have lost so many stored and precious letters, work and photographs, including all my wonderful sunsets/sunrises that I was saving to make my framed mosaic picture. :'( :'( It has certainly taught me a lesson and from now on I will be backing up all my data on a monthly basis. I daren't risk losing everything again and strongly urge you all to make back-up discs so that you don't have to go through the anquish that I have had to.
When my old computer started to go belly up, I backed up everything I wanted to save. Now I save things like pics etc once a month. Also the computer I got was a Hewlett Packard or HP. It did not come with a restore disc. I contacted them and since it was so new and only 1 mo. old, they sent me the disc for free. Sometimes your puter may get a new virus that can't be removed. The easiest thing to do is to reatore it back to what was on it when you first got it. Another place to use backup files.
Yep I also better heed this advise. We get so many blackouts do to load shedding and this practice might claim computers and vital components if one is not prepared. At the moment I cannot afford UPS and thus try to do backups regularly. Incremental backups and once a week a full backup. (sometimes I neglect to do the weekly backup, especially since I did not schedule it.)
Oh, that's a shame that you lost all of that, how heartbreaking! I don't actually do backups, but I do keep everything on my desktop copied onto my laptop and updated regularly. My favorite pictures are stored online as well, so I can't lose them.
Eileen, if it were me, I would probably back-up weekly. Wouldn't seem so time consuming. Just a thought.
Absolutely agree with the back-up idea. My laptop crashed a short while ago and the shop had to 'wipe' everything during attempts at resoration.
I lost a lot of work when one of the hard disks crashed in my computer. I had been backing up but not as much as I should have been. In a perfect storm type of thing when I went to use some of the b/u disks they hadn't written properly :'( So now I write to DVDs and check them after burning and have a couple of spare external hard disks that I archive on.
I can identify with this, our computer gave us the blue screen of death before the holidays - finally it broke down during Christmas season. Around that time we got a new digital camera, then at the middle of January our camera was stolen, over 300 pictures and some movies gone. Now if I had a computer I would have been able to transfer them and our photos would not have been lost. As it is, all the pictures are gone, it was my first Christmas and New Years with my husband and I, my brother and his twins (whom I hadnt seen in 6 years) came to visit. All of our families pictures were lost - I could kick myself for not taking better care of my technology, I know better now.
Thank you Eileen...I have back-up until the last year of my photos...I take so many of them. Today I ended taking up over 300 of them but I do delete the really bad ones. I should really check my computer over and see what I have accumulated over the years that should be copied..
