Remember Kids - Back Up Everything!

How many times have you thought “oooh, best back up those files” or “must remember to make a copy of those email addresses” - well here’s a useful bit of advice, go and do it now (well when you’ve finished reading this blog). Don’t leave it until tomorrow, or maybe next week because it’s not funny finding out that the last couple of years files are now unrecoverable on a now pretty useless lump of metal. And did I have a back up… yes you’re right, I didn’t! And so, a few emails, a bundle of photos, music files, bookmarks and a number of exceptionally brilliant duck videos are now in the PC equivalent of Davy Jones’ locker.

We did try and retrieve them - but after one blue screen of death too many and a fatal error which Jude roughly translated as “your PC is ******” - the hard drive was declared dead. A number of people have said there are ways to retrieve the info and that there are services available that will help if you send them the drive, but as the drive contains login and password information for servers etc, then that information is much safer where it is!

There’s good news in all this though as the PC is dead, long live the new PC! It’s goodbye XP, hello Vista and more memory and hard drive you can shake a large stick at (or hammer as will be the case for the old one).

I’ve immediately started to organise things a lot better than before - bookmarks, emails (all those affiliate network friday emails now get split up into useful folders), contacts, spam filters (goodbye russian and chinese spam!) and yes I will be making sure that everything that’s important is backed up (just need to buy an external hard drive, unless any nice electrical merchant fancies sending me a freebie)!

Anyway - now you’ve read this, go and back up your own PC!

PS If any network/merchant has tried contacting me in the last few days and I’ve not replied then please get in touch!