The Importance Of Back-Up Disks

As some of you will know, a little over two months ago I began to have problems with my faithful laptop, Wilbur. Now, those of you that love your respective gadgets will understand the pain of being separated from your favourite piece of technology. Some people love iPods, some people love mobile (cell) phones, but my personal favourite is the laptop.

My problem, in my mind at least, seemed a simple one to fix. A persistent failure of Windows Explorer could easily be solved by resetting my computer to the previous check point. How did one do this? With the back-up disk, of course. So, I ran the back-up disk, set it back, and all was well.

However, a few days later, this system stopped working. I thought about this for a while, and then decided that my best chance was to run a full destructive recovery. This meant that I would loose all of the files on my computer not saved onto a back-up disk. Seeing as I had no method with which to access those files, I could not back them up, and lost them in the process.

What I did not realise, when running the back-up disk, was that I was running the disk created for my previous laptop (that is, to say, an E-System, not a Compaq), and had neglected to create and back-ups for my current. When the destructive recovery reached the halfway point, the system crashed. I tried to re-run the disk, but to no avail. I was thoroughly stuck, and now, without BOOT MNGR.

Stuck with a laptop without an Operating System, or any means to start, I turned to my Mother (she works in computers), who tried to run the back-up disks from my brother's identical laptop. Alas, they did not work, and so off we went to the TechGuys to have it fixed.

When they themselves could not run my brother's back-ups, they took the laptop from us and said that they would have to install a totally new Operating System, a feat which would cost my Mother £50. And so I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, until finally, Wilbur was returned to me.

Of course, I now owe my mother £50, and will not be getting any pocket money for 5 weeks. This could all have been avoided had I taken the time to create some back-ups when I first attained Wilbur. I had every opportunity to do so, and the instruction manual even told me how, although if I had lost it, I could have certainly retrieved instructions from the internet.

Let's think, where would the internet, and businesses be without back-up disks?

• Those of us that remember the Mibba crash of 2007 (and what a horrible event it was, may it never happen again), will know that a week's worth of updates were lost due to a system crash. If Dujo had not been backing up the website, we would have had to start again from scratch, most likely and everyone would have lost everything.
• Systems such as online banking would loose all record of any transactions made over the internet in the event of a crash or virus, meaning that many people would lose money, savings and purchase records.
• Valuable data would go missing, passwords would be lost and many other such catastrophic (in terms of the internet) events would occur.

It is quite needless to say that I have already created mine. I implore you, do not make my mistake and create a set of your own before an error occurs.