Paranoid Laptop malfunction?

[kenhung123]

It's always been at the back of my mind. What is the worst case scenario when a laptop breaks down?
Can I recover my work in most cases? I am just worried my laptop decides to die on my when I have no other back up for work saved onto my laptop hard drive.

[paulsterio]

It's always been at the back of my mind. What is the worst case scenario when a laptop breaks down?
Can I recover my work in most cases? I am just worried my laptop decides to die on my when I have no other back up for work saved onto my laptop hard drive.

Depends on what you mean by break down - there's a lot of things that can happen.

But like i always say, make backups - I make a backup of my work every day and I'm even more cautious with the ATARNotes book that I'm writing right now, at the end of every writing session, I back it up and also upload it to DropBox.

[kenhung123]

Yeah, like I mean pretty much any time of breakdown really, is it hasn't occured and this is just a precaution.
If there is no way around it I guess I should like back up work weekly of something

[dilks]

Basically as paul says, the more often you back up the less you will lose.

[stonecold]

It really depends what breaks.  Not including work from your current session which will probably be lost if your computer instantly carks it for good, you won't lose anything as long as the HDD is not damaged.  You can just take it out, put it into another computer and all your files will still be there.   Still though, backup as regularly as possible.  I personally am terrible at this and would be lucky to do it once a month. 

[kenhung123]

Did a bit of research, seems like you're right stonecold. As long as the HDD is OK, seems like there are ways to recover any saved work.

[paulsterio]

The thing with backing up is that it's a habit, at the start, it feels like a drainer, but the thing is now that I've been doing it for years, it just feels like the natural thing before I go to bed, like I don't even think twice about it - so get into the habit!

[shinny]

I'd at least backup your school/uni work - assignments and whatnot especially. I've had bad experiences in the past, mainly with laptops (prone to trauma), but have kept relatively good habits since. I've been using a little automated system for a long time now which I wrote a while ago. It's just a .bat file so it doesn't require any additional fiddly software. It basically syncs a folder between your harddrive and a USB/external harddrive to backup only files that have been changed, with the newer version replacing the older one. Handy for backing things up, as well as if you've been working off your USB on a computer at school. It's very fast too since it only backs up updated files. If you want it, the code is:

xcopy "H:\MBBS IV" "D:\Users\Andrew\Documents\MBBS IV" /Y /E /D
xcopy "D:\Users\Andrew\Documents\MBBS IV" "H:\MBBS IV" /Y /E /D

Then just copy that into a notepad file, change the folder paths to whatever fits you, then change the extension of the file to .bat instead. Then it's simply a double click every time you want to back up.

EDIT: Regarding whether it's possible to recover stuff, yes, but I wouldn't rely on it. Many times, especially with a laptop, it'll either be too difficult (laptops are fiddly to pull apart), expensive, or not even possible. Just back up.

[slothpomba]

Yeah...really...make backups. You don't know how much it sucks till a hard-drive or two fries and you lose all the saved files on that drive (your own photos which you cant really replace, music, documents, work, etc). I have two hard-drives in my computer so i back up all the photos and stuff from one, onto the other. I also keep some fairly important stuff (and the semesters folder of uni work) on dropbox as well.

I use this to backup from one drive to the other (shinnys method works as well but its hard to keep track and it always has to copy a full lot, with this it only backs up the stuff changed since the last one and compresses it to make it smaller too which is important if you have a lot of stuff like me) http://www.cobiansoft.com/index.htm <---- free.

Depends what you mean by recover. If the actual drives fry, like they dont spin up, it can be very difficult. I looked into it when it happened to me. I would need to find exactly the same drive somewhere and replace a lot of the parts (very difficult to find the exact old model for parts) or send it to a company with some kind of ultra-advanced clean room and they would recover it for $200...300...something like that.

[shinny]

I use this to backup from one drive to the other (shinnys method works as well but its hard to keep track and it always has to copy a full lot, with this it only backs up the stuff changed since the last one and compresses it to make it smaller too which is important if you have a lot of stuff like me) http://www.cobiansoft.com/index.htm <---- free.

Actually it doesn't copy the full lot - only what's been changed on either side. That's the reason for the extra tags at the end. Doesn't compress though since I didn't intend it to be used as a proper back up; more for synchronisation to my USB really.

[paulsterio]

If you can afford two hard drives and you have a desktop, RAID might be an option, I'd find RAID 1 the easiest to use, that just clones, so basically whatever you write will be written onto two drives, so if one ever fails, you have a carbon copy of it.

Essentially, though, it's too much of a hassle to set up RAID for a home computer - I've always had the intention of doing it, but I keep putting it off, I was going to get a second 2 TB hard drive for my computer and set up the RAID, but I was tempted and got an SSD instead - never looked back from that (A)

[Russ]

RAID only protects you against mechanical failure, it does nothing for a virus or accidentally deleting a file.

Seriously, it's 2012, get a cloud storage service and put your important stuff on that. Or get an external HDD and sync stuff weekly

[paulsterio]

Hmm, good point actually, I never thought about viruses or accidental deletion.

But yeah, I agree just get a could storage service of an external HDD.

Even if you can't afford an external HDD, you can pick up a USB flash drive for quite cheap these days, I've seen 16 GB ones going for less than $20 and 32 GB ones going for around $25 - that should be way more than enough to back up all your work - and for that price - you don't have any excuse (apart from laziness) not to back up.

[Yendall]

Back all your data up through cloud and external HDD to make sure of anything happens, you can recover it with ease.
I has a problem not long ago where I corrupted my USB and lost a few documents that were important, so maybe have several backups across a couple of USBs/External HDDs

[iamtom]

The cloud is a horrible place to recommend to back up, mainly because if something goes wrong (hint: things went wrong a few weeks ago, we were just asleep) you cannot access it. This applies to DropBox, Google Drive, whatever.

Buy a USB with like, 4gb (plenty) and stick your files that you need backed up on there. That's all you really need to do.