I recently read an article on the BBC news website about The Top 10 data disasters. There are some funny stories, like when Dom Joly dropped his Laptop and lost half a book he’d written. Or when one person left an old banana on top of an external hard drive and the juices seeped… you get the idea. It must have been there a while…
It reminded me that I hadn’t really thought about recovery of the data on my desktop; I switched from Windows to Ubuntu Linux only a few months ago and I’ve realised that I store too much on my desktop computer instead of on my (backed up daily) home server.
I suppose most people don’t think about backing up their data until they’ve gone through the process of losing it at least once. I use the wonderful Rsync snapshots backup technique, which quickly backs up huge amount of data, incrementally (so only the changed parts are backed up). This also means that I can see how my data was yesterday, the day before and the day before that. It takes a little setting up, but it works beautifully.
But whether you use Windows or Linux (or whatever OS), you need to backup your stuff if you have things that you’re afraid to lose. It can take a little effort, but once it’s setup it should work by itself - performing the backup manually is a disaster waiting to happen! And of course, following ancient advice, you should try to recover your data before you lose it, just to make sure it’s possible and your backup method works!