In the last 2 weeks I’ve learned a valuable lesson about backing up data. We all know we should do it, we all occasionally think about it. Sometimes, if we’re lucky (and smart) we even make the odd backup, but all too often the hassle and time involved mean it gets put off until another day.

It’s funny how it takes the realisation of our mistakes to really make a lesson hit home. I made a mistake, in fact I made quite a few. Every time I thought to myself “I should probably back these up sometime soon” and didn’t, that was a mistake.

About 2 weeks ago, my computer ground to a halt, shut down, then failed to boot again. It turned out that this was because my hard drive had failed. Music.. photos.. files.. all gone (or at least held inaccessibly where only some expensive recovery work can get them).

My last full backup? Never. Music - about 18 months ago. Photos - about a year.

Luckily many of the most important photos to me will also be on Caroline’s machine, so I should get some of them back. But some are lost forever, along with other pretty irreplaceable stuff like my climbing route log.

So.. as I said before, I’ve learned a lesson. My external drive was out today, and I’m set up and ready to clone my drive weekly. There’s plenty of software out there to help, it just takes a bit of effort up front to get on and do it. Don’t make the same mistake I did…

For Mac (if you haven’t got Time Machine like me) I’d recommend SuperDuper. It’s free, or you can pay for extra features like scheduling backups. For Windows there are a few options, none of which I’ve tried: Norton Ghost or DriveClone are the first 2 that come to mind. Neither are free, but worth every penny I’m sure. There are no doubt some free options out there too, even a scheduled batch file would do!