A Technical One

Yesterday Jason was flustered because his computer stopped functioning properly and he nearly lost all his data. He recently got a new MP3 player which came preinstalled with a nice set of malware. That in itself was no problem, as it was easy to remove with a few simple registry edits. Jason backed up the registry and tried every available recovery method to return the computer to a functioning state after the registry edit did it's damage. Still, none of them worked and it almost resulted in the loss of valuable data. This should teach us a few lessons:

1. Backup your data. A lot. CD's and DVD's can be useful if you don't have a whole lot of data, but a lot of times it's just not enough. I really recommend investing in an external hard drive (or buying a cheap internal hard drive and a USB enclosure) and using it only for backups. Turn it off and unplug it (from the wall outlet) when it's not in use to ensure your data will be safe. Maybe even make monthly backups of this drive on DVD+-RW media if you're really paranoid. Another viable option would be backing up your data to another partition on your hard drive. That way, when simply reinstalling Windows, your data will be safely tucked away elsewhere. This option however, won't save you from disk failure or malware that may repartition and format your drive.

2. Have multiple partitions. Of course, you could put your data on a separate partition to begin with and save a lot of trouble. This won't work if you forget to keep all your data on the other partition, which will be displayed as a seperate drive (or you could mount a particular folder to the partition in XP/2000). I generally have a small Windows partition, a large (20 GB+) data partition, and another large partition for installed programs. Having multiple partitions also increases (perceived) disk performance and reduces fragmentation. This is not a replacement for backing up files regularly though, and you can still lose data if your drive fails.

3. Always have a Linux boot disk available. The Windows installation CD can be a valuable tool in recovering your Windows installation without losing data, when it works. Instead, try KNOPPIX, a richly featured Linux distribution that runs directly from the liveCD. Just pop in the disc, and you'll be given full access to your Windows drive. It does help to know what you're doing and fortunately you'll also have full access to the Internet (assuming you have broadband). You can even run regedit, even though it's in a round about way (importing your Windows registry into wine, editing it, and then overwriting the file). Having a copy of the KNOPPIX CD is always a good idea just in case.

That's just something to think about. If you don't do anything else on the list, absolutely backup! You'll thank me later.