Back it up!!!

I recently returned from 8 days of vacation (traveling with the drum corps my kids were performing with) and before I left I did the “right” thing and powered down all my PCs, laptops, etc. Upon my return I fired up my main PC to upload the photos I’d taken and was greeted by errors stating that my data drive was not available. After my initial reaction of “oh s**t!!!” I did some poking around including pulling the drive from the case and testing it using an external dock. I quickly determined that the drive was “dead”.

Fortunately, a few months back I had implemented a regular back up strategy. After trying out some online offerings I settled on using Genie-soft’s Backup Manager (www.genie-soft.com) to run nightly backups to an external drive. Each week I do a full backup with nightly incremental backups and rotate the drives each week always keeping one off-site.

After purchasing a new drive (1 TB Seagate Barracuda) I kicked off the Genie-soft Backup Manager restore. It took me a couple of days to restore the 400+ GB of photos and data as I was unusually careful to verify the restore and make sure I had the latest versions of files. The restore went off without a hitch and, at this point, I feel confident that I haven’t lost crucial files.

My words of advice from this experience is… “back it up, back it up, back it up!!!” I still had that panicky feeling when I determined the drive was dead, but am now very appreciative of the fact that I had a reasonable backup strategy in place. I can’t imagine the stress I would have had if I’d not been able to restore all those files within a couple of days.

Thanks again to Genie-soft for a great product!