Major computer death - what do you figure are best recovery backup survival tools
 

So my main work computer, which was getting old, suddenly died on me.

The disks are okay, but the computer itself has all the characteristics of a rock. Power goes on, disks spool up, but black screen, no beeps, no reaction to keyboard or even pushing the shut off button (plug has to be pulled to shut it off).

So, while I wait for the new machine to come, I am working on an old slow machine I've always kept as a backup, but neglected.

I have the main disk of the work machine running as a slave in this old backup machine - all teh data is fine.

So, dealing with this has made me wonder about other peoples backup survival and recovery tools and solutions. What do you folks do to deal with a hassle like this?

Sorry to hear about your computer. :(

I usually upgrade my computer every 2-3 years after the warranty expires. This is something I've done since I god my first PC.

I'm always keeping my work data on 2 HDD's and I regularly burn DVDs, which is pretty safe but annoying as hell. :) I'm planning to buy a 64 GB usb stick sometime in the near future, and keep all my data on it instead of burning all those DVDs :)

Sure, it's unpleasant when these kind of things happen, but I'm always prepared.

I do the same as JackDaniel's, many ex' HDD's and DVD back ups. And long over due am starting to look into nortons ghost product, advanced backup and recovery.

Burn an ISO disk image of the hole HDD and copy to a DVD(s) or ex HDD. In the case of loss of data or system failure, use the iso copy to replace lost date or get your system going again. But is is only as good as the last time you made a backup copy. And it is pucken nortons, but can not find anything else as good at this time.

Time Machine and I always have a few older computers laying around that I can use plus I keep off site archives of Time Machine images.

Your computer problem sounds like memory. Try changing out the memory sticks one at a time.

I keep data on external hard drives, and have a ghost image of the main drive(programs) on them also.

DVDs are almost twice the cost of using external drives.

Give Away of the Day has good licensed backup options for free all the time.

Well, I've been wanting to get a more powerful computer for a while, so I'm not sorry the machine died, just inconvienienced.

I figure once I have a new machine I'm going to play with this dead one, use it as an exercise in computer repair and building.

Isn't there some sort of tool that keeps critical data on a flash drive as a backup of your most important stuff? I thought I read about that once. Keeps all your mail and settinsg and stuff - but my memory could be faulty.

The same as Cleo does, I use Time Machine too, but there must be something similar for PC/Windows users.

The advantage of using this kind of system is that you don't have to worry about backing up manually (or putting it off). Time Machine makes incremental backups every hour, every day, copying just the files that have changed since your last backup. It saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month, and it does this all in the background, so you don't have to do anything. Well, aside from arranging to store copies of the backups off-site for real safety of course.

Thanks for the tip, Cleo/Simon, Would anyone know of something similar that will work with XP SP3. This sounds like a very handy program.

Time Machine for Windows aka the Backup utility
|couch|

We used a backup pc to save data originally and then I moved over to shadow protect which is good but we are now going to move to Carbonite.
$54 a year for complete peace of mind and no hassle recovery regardless of disaster.

That price is the same irrespective of the amount of data saved as well.

Carbonite only works when you are not. You can retrieve one file or a whole backup to your existing or new pc and all data stored is double encrypted so you are the only person who can ever access it.

Check out their 'How it works' tab for full details.

another vote for time machine.

I also have a complete disk image of a fresh install with most applications installed. So if anything happened to my time machine I could at least be back up and running at a certain point.

I need to actually go get some new hard drives. Currently time machine is on a 500gb.

One of these days I'm going to take the time to perform a complete reinstall of everything. Just at the moment don't feel like taking the time to do it.

one vote for raid 5 here.....

really not that hard to set up, you can use 3 or more disks, (you loose the capacity of 1 disk: ie 4 x 120GB disks, you get 360 GB usable space). If one of your disks dies, you just replace it, and the data is rebuilt from the other disks.

Another good option is Clone Box

what I've done if the HD is still good and the OS is trashed is to hook it up slave in another box and see if you can explore it

when my motherboard went bad and while trying to diagnose it, I ruined the OS, so I got another MB used my old HD and pulled what I needed like my bookmarks, music and my webs for frontpage

and just reinstalled my programs on a new HD with a fresh install of xp, infact I still have the drive hooked up and pull as i go, you can even get your old emails, you just gotta know where to look

Sorry to hear about your puter Bill.

A year ago I lost a months worth of freesites. I was building and building for the future kind of thing. Suddenly my puter froze up and died. It still kinda hurts talking about it.

Now I have and external harddrive for storage and backup. I'm close to backing that up as well.