I have said many times that it is not a question of if you hard drive will crash, it is when.  Well, it happened to us last week.  The drive in our main family PC quit on us one night.  Luckily I have a decent backup plan.  I put all my files I want to save (pictures, music, docs, Etc) in a central folder structure.  Then every night I copy that folder structure to another machine on my network and to a USB attached hard drive.  I also take periodic copies to DVD and store that off-site.  Notice I said decent, not perfect.  E-mail burned me.  Although I backup up the files every night, I found that my Outlook files were open every night and they did not copy to my backup locations.  I knew that, I’m a DBA, I have to explain that in meetings every couple weeks or so.   Fortunately,  I was able to us a Knoppix disk access what was left of my crashed hard drive and retrieve the necessary files.  Thus my address book was restorable.  But the point of this post is it can and will happen to anyone.  So make sure you have a backup plan, and most importantly test that the files you think are being backed up are being backed up in a usable form.  So that is my quick PSA for the day.  Of course, there is always an need for your blood, so donate every time you are able.

Dep