Sage Advice - Backup Your Data!
From the Desk of David Pogue from nytimes.com:
Another Reminder to Back Up by David Pogue:
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You know, you can only be lucky for so long. In the case of my Dell PC, that was about a year and a half. I came to my desk one morning, turned it on, and got this message on the screen: "DISK READ ERROR. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.
"Dell's technicians, in thick Bombay accents, directed me to perform a number of tweaks, tests and experiments. After several hours, they announced that the hard drive must have died, and everything on it was lost.Now, I do back up my My Documents folder. So I had a safety copy of all my books, columns, music and pictures. And I have my original installation discs for all my programs.
But I suddenly I remembered two items that Windows does not keep in My Documents: First, my Outlook message database, containing about 2,000 recent e-mail messages from readers to whom I hadn't yet replied (sorry, gang!). Second, the voice files for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the program I use to dictate my books and e-mail. Over the years, I've added hundreds of customized terms and commands, and honed the accuracy to a shine by making thousands of individual corrections. They were gone. Needless to say, I was DEEPLY annoyed.
Entire article here.
Another Reminder to Back Up by David Pogue:
========================
You know, you can only be lucky for so long. In the case of my Dell PC, that was about a year and a half. I came to my desk one morning, turned it on, and got this message on the screen: "DISK READ ERROR. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.
"Dell's technicians, in thick Bombay accents, directed me to perform a number of tweaks, tests and experiments. After several hours, they announced that the hard drive must have died, and everything on it was lost.Now, I do back up my My Documents folder. So I had a safety copy of all my books, columns, music and pictures. And I have my original installation discs for all my programs.
But I suddenly I remembered two items that Windows does not keep in My Documents: First, my Outlook message database, containing about 2,000 recent e-mail messages from readers to whom I hadn't yet replied (sorry, gang!). Second, the voice files for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the program I use to dictate my books and e-mail. Over the years, I've added hundreds of customized terms and commands, and honed the accuracy to a shine by making thousands of individual corrections. They were gone. Needless to say, I was DEEPLY annoyed.
Entire article here.