8 Tips How To Survive a System Crash

By Gunter Gerdenitsch
Posted Friday, August 27, 2004

Once in a while it happens to every one of us, a total system crash of your computer. But life must go on, even after that. All you can do is reformat your hard drive, reinstall the operating system, and - well, do what you can, hoping not to lose too much of your data?

After all, with a business on the Internet all of your prospects are hinging on having all your data available at any time. You just cannot afford to let your customers, business partners, etc. feel any difference between the time BEFORE and AFTER the "greatest assumable disaster" you can
experience with a computer!

You cannot prevent the loss of time you suffer while working to get everything in order again. You quite often cannot avoid the loss of some money, for re-purchasing the software tools that you have lost. There is also the cost you may incur for the time of a hardware specialist. But at least
you can prevent a serious loss of data. In particular, files that you put in many hours of work building, which are practically irreplaceable. Here's what you can do:

1. When you buy your computer, be sure to ask the dealer for a diskette or CD-ROM with the drivers for every hardware component that is not standard in the operating system. ('Drivers' are those pieces of software that the operating system needs for handling a hardware component.) Usually such a diskette or CD-ROM has an "autorun" program stored: You just need to insert it in the diskette/CD-ROM drive - and the driver installs itself.

2. When you re-buy your computer, ask the dealer to remove the hard drive from the old computer and transfer your critically needed files onto the new one. Depending on your dealer, he will do it for a very small amount of money or even for free. Thus you gain two advantages:

- You have your old data available from day 1 and can continue your work more comfortably, almost exactly at the point from where you left off the day before (on your old computer).
- You have a lot of extra storage space you can use for daily backup.

3. A "daily backup" is extremely important to everyone who is working on any "project" that is more extensive than one day. Be it development of your web site, you might be writing articles, developing promotional material (or software like me). It is absolutely vital to be able to return to yesterday's version within a few seconds.

The importance of a 'daily backup' is not so much that you have fully up-to-date copies of your most important files in case of any dramatic breakdown of your system. It is important because only with that "security net" can you work freely. You know you cannot lose more than one day's work even if you see that your recent work took a wrong direction.

4. As a "professional" computer user you will eventually feel the need to have a second computer, typically a portable one. When you buy it you should take care that it has a large hard drive (considerably larger than what you intend to do with it!) and a network card. All you need then is a simple peer-to-peer connection to your desktop computer. Now you can easily backup your desktop machine to the extra storage space on your portable. This is a pretty inexpensive way of doing backup of many hundreds of megabytes.

5. In addition to 'daily backup', I prefer to do a 'weekly backup' every weekend. For compact backup storage, the daily backup covers only those files that - according to your experience - are the most "volatile" ones, i.e. that are modified frequently. Contrarily, the weekly backup covers ALL files. In case of a serious malfunction or even a system crash you will be glad that you have a weekly version available giving you the option of restoring a full sub- directory, exactly as it was before that event.

6. You should use one directory on your portable computer for "long-term backup". Particularly if you often download a software and don't have any physical representative of it. You would be literally at a loss if you only had kept it on your hard drive. (Remember: All you can do after a „crash" is re-format the whole hard drive. Even if it might turn out later to be a "shot in one’s own knee"!)

7. Re-arrange the directory structure on your desktop computer, creating one primary root directory, with a sub- directory for every application you use to work with. I call mine simply, "Own". (So I have a "C:\Own\Winword", "E:\Own\Eudora", etc.) Thus you can trigger a daily backup by simply pressing a key. This is a good preparation for your daily, as well as weekly backup.

The sub-directories under the root "Own" are only to take the data files associated with Winword, Eudora or any other programs that create output. Their executables are usually stored under "Programs" ("C:\Programs\Winword", "E:\Programs\Eudora", etc.) With most of the modern
applications you have the option of "redirecting" them. Then they will take their input files from and store their output files to any other directory than where their executables are residing. Sometimes you should be thinking about this alternative ahead of time when installing an application.

8. Whenever you create or modify a file (whatever the file type), be sure to write/update the current date in a comment line near the top. Should you ever have to restore it later, nothing is more frustrating than working for hours to overcome some mysterious error. Then finding that an outdated file caused these errors. When you replace it by the up-to-date file, all those errors have disappeared.

These 3 kinds of backup procedures work well together in the concept of "multi-level backup". You can download details for this concept from my web site: (http://www.1st-components.com/article7.htm, article8.htm), article9.htm and article10.htm

Finally, let's not forget that, especially in computing there is hardly anything bad that wouldn't have any positive side effect. Over time a lot of the "scrap" will assemble on your hard drive. Nowadays that's not much of a problem, just some wasted storage space. But remember the performance is diminished when the operating system has to struggle with a lot of complicated entanglements.

When experiencing a system crash you are virtually FORCED to re-format the hard drive. Thus you doing away with all that scrap. Your computer will work more smoothly now than it did before. If you’re lucky, some nearly forgotten features that worked only when your computer was new, are in working once again.

So, in some sense you could call a system crash an act of "self-purification" of your system!

About the Author
Article by Gunter Gerdenitsch, owner of '1st Components Design', Universal Software Components for Computer Applications without Programming.

(http://www.1st-components.com/)
mailto:gunter@1st-components.com