After coming back from vacation my 3 year old, self-built PC that I use as
my primary home workstation threw a little fit. It turned out that my main
hard drive that holds the OS and installed applications had died. Luckily my
anal retentive backup policy paid off. It was a pain in the butt to install
XP on a new disk, apply all patches, install all my security utilities, applications,
internal and peripheral drivers and software but the net result is that after
a few hours work my PC is back up and running without loosing a scrap of data
or a single photo.
It is not a question of if your hard drive will ever die, it is just a question
of when it will occur. If you take photography even vaguely seriously and your
PC is your darkroom and repository don't take any chances; backup your photos
often. I am so glad that I did. The freeware
version of SyncBack has now saved my ass both at work and at home. When
used in conjunction with a large external hard drive or two it's a great freebie
that provides simple but effective backups and piece of mind. This is the first
time I've had a PC die and have not been worried about my data; I knew everything
was safe. That made the inevitable a whole lot less stressful. |