MY COLLEAGUE'S four-year-old work laptop just crashed an hour ago (as I was penning this column).
The early diagnosis from the IT department is that she might not get all her data back as the hard disk is riddled with bad sectors.
As I looked into her eyes, I saw fear and regret. Fear that all five years' worth of contacts as a tech journalist, all stashed in an Excel spreadsheet, might be wiped out in an instant. Regret because she never backed up her hard disk drive.
Like many tech writers, my professional mantra to readers is back up, back up, back up.
Unfortunately, we do not always practise what we preach - until tragedy strikes.
In my case, it was not until I lost my mobile phone and had to create my contact list from scratch all over again that the lesson was brought home.
Many of us back up our data to portable USB hard disks.
I even used network-attached storage (NAS), which lets multiple PCs in a network share the same drive. After a while, I did not even bother saving my photos to the PC and stored them directly onto the network drive.
Four months later, the hard disk in the NAS sputtered its last breath. I had to spend a small fortune to send it to a professional data recovery centre to retrieve the special memories I had of my elder daughter when she was a baby.
My mistake was to stinge and place only one hard disk drive into the four-bay NAS. Today, my photos are stored in one main PC and two USB portable drives but I plan to get a new four-bay NAS with four hard drives. If one hard drive fails, I can just swop the drive with a new one and the NAS continues to run.
Digital Life will be running a special networking feature early next year that will give you the lowdown on how to set up your own NAS at home.
Meanwhile, here is an easy backup tip: Just e-mail all important documents as attachments to your own Gmail account, which has a whopping 7GB of free space.
ginlee@sph.com.sg
This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 31 December 2008.
