Another Computer Crash!

Not too long ago, I had a major computer crash which cost me over a week of work trying to get my computer back up and running. I had a corrupted data drive at that time which needed recovery work done. Luckily, I was able to do that myself with the help of data recovery software. But it ate up a lot of my time back then.

Being paranoid, I went out and bought a software called Second Copy which copies the files I want backed up on a consistent and automatic basis. Just before the crash this time (actually, my computer would not display anything on the desktop except the picture I used as a wallpaper on the screen) I had done the last backup earlier in the morning.

This time's computer problem made me lose perhaps 150 emails which I did not get a chance to move to the data drive and resided only on the C: drive of my computer. After trying everything from running "Last Known Good" and "Safe Modes" upon startup, I determined that it was hopeless to get the computer up and running. I even got several "blue screen" notices while trying to fix the computer. Blue Screens are known as the kiss of death in computers. The only thing left to do was to wipe the drive (reformat it) and to reinstall the operating system and all the programs.

So anyone who had sent me an email in the past few days, I'm sorry, but it's gone. However, the multiple thousands of other emails I have received over the years still remain safe as it was backed up on my data drive. All of my critical data and work is also safe. All that I lost with the crash this time around was time, some emails and some email addresses, plus my appointment calendar. Most of the calendar was backed up on my Dell handheld computer, however.

To get the computer working and to load all the programs back took one LONG day of effort. That's actually not too bad considering how long it took to fix the last crash! In fact, this crash helped me to clean up the computer by eliminating some programs I no longer use and also the re-installation actually helped speed up the computer as well.

If you want to be safe on your computer, store your data on an external hard drive and only use your internal C: drive to load your operating system and program files. If you ever have a crash like mine, you'll be able to get yourself back up and running in a faster time and you won't have to worry about lost data. You could even backup the C: drive completely too to get a faster recovery time... but I prefer to reload the programs as needed and to eliminate those I don't use anymore. Somehow a clean install always seems to speed up the processing time of the computer... at least for me.