For those of you who still don't have a data backup plan, here's another post to try and make you rethink.

My Dell M60 laptop just died, my C:\ is dead, and I can't even reformat the drive.

but have no fear! I knew this day would come, and just last week finished moving/deleting/backing up all my apps and data off the laptop.

I learned from others, please do so too

Amen, Brother phreaq ... this is the message that never gets old.

Just last month, my oldest desktop (which I use for my graphics / web authoring applications) started having trouble booting up ... Once it got going, I plugged in an external HD and starting dragging stuff off the C drive -- fortunately, most of the data on that PC is on a secondary HD, leaving me with minimal moving duties. As I feared, the next time I tried to boot up, nothing happened....

In the event, it turned out to be a bad power supply ... but could just as easily have been a non-recoverable C drive failure. You'll never know what you're facing until it's too late.

A 1T drive is available for under $250 at big box stores ... and 500gb for under $150 ... that's another way of saying it's relatively cheap and easy to plan for the worst ...

Madame is absolutely right. With the cheap prices for large storage devices today, there's no excuse for not having a back up plan.

IMHO, that back up plan should include redundancy of media and other data on a separate device (preferably one that can be stored in a separate location when not in use) as well as partition cloning or imaging in the event that a sytem HDD goes kaput.

I guess you all know the problems I had before with losing data (its been well documented on the forums here). I recently discovered this Western Digital external hard drive which im considering getting. It contains two 500gb drives one of which mirrors the other for twice the protection. Has anyone else used it and if so is it any good?

For less $$, you could buy two 1TB external HDDs, and simply repeat your back up - I'd wager you'd be hard pressed to use up all that space unless you're downloading loads of High Def content.

Check Out Newegg

My server uses 2 500GBdrives, one as my master, that all my computers connect to, and the other is a copy of the first.

Since M$ decided to pull RAID out of XP, I use SyncToy to push the new/changed data from the master to the copy.

Not the best solution, as a fire will take out my whole system, but it's better than just the one HD.

Also, now that my newly formatted laptop is almost up and running, I am once again amazed at the speed of a clean install. Highly recommended!

yes back it up serveral times if needed!!!

over a year or so ago i lost pretty much everything, except what i could find on b/u discs i had made and started making, sad thing was the crash occured when i was actually backing everything over to a new hard drive.....




So b/u b/u b/u