Preparing for that Disaster

I am not talking about the end of the world here, so you can relax. I am referring to the disaster that affects the IT world like when your system “crashes’’. A system will crash for either of these two reasons if not both. First of all, as a result of the Operating system becoming corrupt or the hard disk drive getting bad. Both can happen as a result of improper or forceful shut down of your system either by you or the system (when you have a bad battery). The corrupt OS can be solved either by repairing the OS or Installing a new OS (format) while for the Hard disk drive; sadly the only logical thing to do is to replace it.
I know a lot of you will be saying you can back up your files, yes you are right. You can back up, problem solved. But then again ask yourself, what happens when your back up fails or gets missing. A lot of you will be saying that’s not possible. Let me tell you a real life experience and to let you know it can happen. I have this system, the battery is bad (I have been looking to replace it, I am serious x_x). Anyways, like you know the light situation isn’t perfect, anytime the light goes, few minutes later my laptop goes off. This was happening a lot, anyhow I will just put it on whenever they brought the light; till one faithful day I put on my system and it was started up, gave it to my friend, I think he was trying to copy something from his external hard drive to my system, during the process of copying, my system froze for about 30 minutes, anyways I pressed the power button to shut it down. When I tried putting it on, a message came up that windows could not start up. I tried to do the start up repair, took 48 hours and it couldn’t be solved, PHCN decided to put me out of my misery by taking light(my battery still bad) When they brought the light, my system refused to come on. I mean it just didn’t come on. Something told me to try bending it on its side. I know it sounds crazy but I was desperate. I bent it and you would believe it came on. I took a picture so u guys will see I am not lying.

 

 

When the system came on, I had to reinstall the old OS. I didn’t mind at least it came on. I already had back up my files on my external hard disk, on a flash drive and on my friend’s system. I was extremely thorough. Anyways my system was taking a long time to reinstall the OS. I am not talking about hours here, talking about days. I am pretty sure you know what happened next, PHCN struck. I was becoming fed up with it but I had no one to blame except myself. I turned it on and had to do the same process over again and it even had to do a check disk on the hard drive. It was taking days again, I have already lost over a week’s worth of work. PHCN finally put the dagger in the heart. They struck and that was the end of the hard drive. You are asking how did I know? I was suspecting that the hard drive might be the cause so I opened the system and kept it one of those hard drive casing with USB and tried repairing it from another system. It told me that my HD was unreadable, that it couldnt define the volume and so many other things. I was resolved to getting a new HD. I had my back up so I didn’t care. All of a sudden, my external HD started messing up, I couldn’t copy things from it and copy to it, did a lot of repairs till one day it didn’t come on. I tried opening it on another OS (Linux). For those that don’t know. There are times that windows would or can not open some flash drives or HD but other OS will be able. Anyways, it wasn’t showing on Linux. That was the end of the external HD. I started looking for my flash, and lo and behold it was missing. Apparently one of my friends “borrowed’’ it without asking. I asked him about my files, he said when he put the flash drive inside the USB port, that he got a message that prompted him to format and he did. I thought I was dreaming. I just went to bed immediately. Woke up the next day to find out that I wasn’t dreaming. I was becoming desperate, I called my friend that I backed up my files asking him how far, he gave me the final blow. He too had to replace his HD. I gave up. I lost over 450 GB worth of setups, documents, songs. Everything you could possibly think of. I had no choice but to start everything all over again. But I learnt my lesson and learnt other ways that I should have done and some other processes I skipped. I felt I should share with you.
ALWAYS SET A SYSTEM RESTORE POINT
Computers cant give you 100 percent efficiency, the best it can do is 99.999%. So you should be wary. By setting a system restore point, you can always set your system to the last time your computer was in a good condition. In case your system all of a sudden develops a fault.
BACK UP YOUR FILES
Always try to back up your files weekly or monthly or when you make important changes. You can never over back up your files. I have learnt additional ways apart from the conventional ones. First, put your files in a folder and zip it. After which send an email to yourself. So in case you need it, you can go to your inbox and download it from there (provided you don’t delete your box) and the next one is sky drive (which we will discuss much later). Finally, Google allows you to back up your files online. (Thank you Google).

ENSURE YOUR COMPUTER IS WORKING OPTIMALLY
Try not to go over a month without shutting down your system. Most of us are guilty of putting the system to sleep or hibernating or simply just closing the system. Make sure you do routine checks for example de-fragmentation, disk clean up and ensure your anti-virus is up to date.

I am sure you guys were expecting that since I told you about the different types of disasters, I should at least tell you how you can prevent them. Sadly the best you can do is detect them and react to them. You just have to pray that you are lucky.

Thanks for the reading.