It seems that every couple years I end up posting something about the importance of have current backups of the files on you computer. If you are like me, you have lots of photos, notes and other files, not just for cast iron, but for many things.
I've had two recent events that ended well, but could have been nasty.
Last year my primary hard drive started to get flakey. It would disappear sometimes. I thought it was my old motherboard, but bought a new drive last January (2017). The drive in my computer settled down and didn't cause any real problems for most of the year so I just procrastinated, changing the drive is not hard, but takes several hours. Just after Thanksgiving, the drive disappeared, I had a terrible time getting it back, took about an hour, and I figured out it was the drive, not the motherboard. Ran a full backup, including system image to an external drive (takes about 9 hours - there's a lot). It completed fine. I shut down, put the new drive in and prepared to clone the old one. I never got the old one to wake up again - it was dead for good. Thankfully I was able to restore from the fresh backup and all is well (I did lose a partition full of data, but had that backed up elsewhere.) Finally discarded that old drive yesterday after trying every trick I know to revive it including a few hours in the freezer :D (an old trick that may not work on newer drives.)
So that ended well.
Now for yesterday. I got up and the machine said, Windows needs to restart to finish installing updates. No problem, I said to restart.
Windows got into booting then told me it had a problem. It couldn't find the boot drive. Grrrr!!! had my new drive failed - with no backup yet this year?
So the troubleshooting started. This time, the motherboard did say the drive was there. I also knew it was working enough to let windows boot enough to let me know it had a problem. So I decided to try going back to a Windows Restore Point, something Windows creates when it makes significant updates. (In the old days it was called the last good boot data). Had one from January 3, so I let Windows go back to that. That would eliminate any recent updates.
Took about an hour, then Windows came up just fine. Out came the external drive and a full backup and image, 9 hours well spent.
The computer has been fine since, all current updates have been applied and are functioning well. Must have been a stray cosmic ray causing the glitch.
So, the purpose of this long note?
Regularly backup those files that are important to you to an external device. Could be a big thumb drive, portable hard drive, or even the cloud. The key is to get it set up and do it.
Tom
