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I
have learned through a series of disastrous experiences the
damage that can be caused by loss of data. Depending on
what you saved, sometimes you can assign a monetary value but
sometimes it is literally "priceless" (think
pictures of your honeymoon!).
Hot to take care of your data?
- Save, save, save. And save it in
more than one location (or more if the data is even more
important).
- Find out an optimum cycle to back up your
data. For me now it is once a day but it can be less
or more frequent depending on your situation.
What to do if your disk crashes?
Going back to
my story of the Compaq Presario, it just died one fine morning
when I was working. I checked the electrical supply and
looked for a loose connection, but everything seemed
fine. Believe it or not I went to have a cup of coffee
and plugged it back again and it started to work fine. I
thought "Stupid computers!" and almost forgot about
it. But no, it died once again in an hour or so.
That is when I panicked. When I did a Google search
I found that there were literally thousands of unhappy Compaq
customers and their computers just died. Even though I
had some backup but it was not 100%. The bulletin boards
talked about taking the battery out, putting the computer in
the refrigerator, or just shaking it a bit. It worked
and the computer came back again. At this point, I
started to feverishly backup everything that I had on that
computer.
And then I
called a computer expert and this is what he advised:
- If you hear no sounds at all (if the fan
is not running), it signals a major problem with the hard
disk and it is best to leave the computer alone. Do
not try to hit the computer or do anything aggressive in
frustration.
- Call a company like Disk Doctors Lab, Inc.
There are many others like this company. They will
take your hard drive and try to recover your data, often
with the promise that you don't pay if you don't get your
data back.
- Once you get your data back and if your
computer starts to function normally, it is OK to use the
computer but save your data someplace else. That
computer is no longer reliable even for an hour of work
(That is what has happened to my Compaq Preasario.
After a week or so of not using it, the computer started
to work. I did a hard drive scan and it gave me an
error message saying that a system file was missing.
It did not find the file on the Windows CD but then I put
the name of the file in Google
and found a website that you could download the
file. When the file was installed, the computer has
worked fine since then. What do I use the computer
for now? Only to surf the web in the kitchen!)
Recommended article: Better
care of your computer and electronics Blank
laptop screen problem
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