If you have one HD crash, you're probably more likely to have another one in the future with the same hard drive.
Just yesterday, I had a small HD crash, leaving some data corrupted. I managed to backup most of my important data before the crash happened (what a stroke of luck) and restored stuff like my e-mail address book. I just realized that I have close to a life time of data sitting on this computer, starting from my university years.
Probably the most important data are my digital pictures and old university assignments. Looking back, I think I managed to solve some rather interesting problems in my spare time and I would hate for the work I did a long time back to get suddenly lost. Who knows, I might find some interesting use for them in the future. Probably the most important data to me are my pictures. I have digital photos dating all the way back to 2002 on this computer and it would be a terrible shame to lose them all. It's also quite interesting how all the data relating to our lives have become so digitized of the span of the last decade. Children born nearly 10 years ago, may be able to store their entire lifetime of photos in a digital format and by the time they grow old, they'll have a digital photo album of their entire life. The sound of a project like that now sounds really fascinating to me and I think there are lots of interesting opportunities for this kind of data. But I digress.
After the small crash I had yesterday, I just realized how vulnerable my data was and decided it was time to start baking up data that I'd hate to lose, mainly all my application data, pictures, university work, and music collection.
The interesting part of this is how little data I have, about 130 GB of data. I have about 3 GB hard drive space on the computer! Maybe over the course of a life time, I may only have about a 2~3 TB in total. That is amazing little compared to the size of a standard HD today.
Anyways, I just finished backing up all my data today on a separate HD and found a great program in Linux that just checks files and folders for changes only and will automatically update the archive copy. I've also setup the process to be automated so I'll have a fresh backup everyday. There is no way, I want to lose a lifetime of data now.
Perhaps it is also time to consider an offsite backup location too.
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