Sometimes You Don’t Get A Happy Ending

In my favorite television show, “Doctor Who”, the story of most of the episodes is as follows: the main character (The Doctor) encounters some seemingly impossible problem and then wonderfully, magically, impossibly, finds a solution to the benefit of all.

In other words, if there was a fight, a conflict, a battle: he wins.

Usually.

Because my company is called ‘Critical Computer’, it has always been natural to promote what we do in a medical framework; the patients are the computers, ailing, dying, needing help.  I’m the Doctor, who diagnoses the patient and using my considerable skill and experience, makes them all better again.  We win.

Usually.

Recently, I had a patient die.  Her hard disk corrupted, and despite all my efforts – many, many hours of effort and dollars spent or parts, tools, and data recovery software – I just could not bring her back.  Oh, the  things I tried!  While I still saved the computer with the purchase of a new hard drive, all the previous data was gone.

All gone. All the documents.  All those irreplaceable pictures of friends and family.  All the important documents.  Email. Addresses.  Everything. Faced with that kind of loss, it is no wonder folks end up spending thousands (yes, no exaggeration, thousands) of dollars getting what little they can back.  And even then? Absolutely no guarantees.

Hard drives do not last forever… they fail eventually…  It is just a matter of time (pun intended, Doctor Who fans).

Let’s see if we can take a lesson from this patient’s misfortune.

There is a company called Code 42, headquartered right here in Minnesota.  They provide a product and service called Crashplan.  They have packages for home and business computers.

It’s good.  It works. It’s inexpensive.  The best endorsement I could probably give it is… I use it myself on my work computer.

If you make backups on an external drive or even CD/DVD – great!  But where do you keep that media?  Next to the computer? In the same office?What if someone stole it – or you had a fire? One logistic folks often forget is that if you store your backups with your computer, they are only as secure as the computer.  With Crashplan, they’re stored securely away… over in New Brighton, I think.

It is just common sense to have a backup. If a virus or malware gets into your computer (and you know it will, even with antivirus), it will probably cost you about $150-$200.00 to get rid of it – minimum.  However, any data it corrupted will not be usable.  So yay, while you got rid of the virus, you still lost data.  And then add up how long you were unable to work on the computer – those hours you’re not getting back, either.

Final word: I can’t see any reason why your irreplaceable data isn’t worth $120 a year to protect.  You’ll save time and money on recovery, no matter what the reason.