My main hard drived just died so i'll be offline today (8/16/09)

[mouser]

the hard drive on my main pc apparently completely failed last night while i was asleep.

i believe (pray) i have a week-old backup.

hopefully all will go well and i will be back without much data loss sometime today.

-mouser

ps1.
if i don't get back online in time -- some other coder on the forum needs to make a screencast of their program and post it, so we keep with the one-screencast-per-day project this month.
ps2.
i can still access the forum from secondary pc so ill be around occasionally today.

[lanux128]

sad to hear that but good luck on the data restoration.

[mouser]

ok i'm back.. not much lost.

just another reminder that backups are SO important.  i got lucky this time since i had a recent backup.

please everyone develop a backup system and stick to it.

[Ampa]

Phew! Glad to hear you didn't have to go through too much stress.

[f0dder]

*cough* RAID-1 *cough*

[nudone]

*cough* RAID-1 *cough*

or use MirrorFolder if nothing else - which offers more choice (being able to select specific folders).

[mahesh2k]

[gexecuter]

That's bad to hear, i backup my stuff into a dvd every time that i re-install windows. Not the best method but it's all i have since i have only one hard drive.

[mouser]

i backup my stuff into a dvd every time that i re-install windows. Not the best method but it's all i have since i have only one hard drive.

that's just not good enough.

you need to establish a system for backing up your documents and data much more regularly.. maybe using a free online backup service.

[f0dder]

*cough* RAID-1 *cough*

or use MirrorFolder if nothing else - which offers more choice (being able to select specific folders).

Yeah, that'd work as well. The point is you need your most important stuff automatically synchronized to a second physical disk, at all times, and of course in addition to a backup scheme.

I personally prefer RAID-1 since you can keep running your system while waiting for new disk / rebuilding the array. My main disk is now a SSD, though, so I'm out of the RAID-1 game for my workstation

[y0himba]

I lost my main HDD last night also.  about 1am-ish as I was getting ready to go to bed, BSOD.  I keep all of my documents on a separate physical internal HDD (D:) and when I install Windows I just change the paths to the "My Documents" folder Etc.

I keep an image of Installed and configured Vista on an external USB drive, and do incremental updates every night automatically using Acronis True Image.

I also install Steam and all of the games on that drive, then all I need to do is install the Steam client to the directory and my games are there, configured.  

It took about an hour to be back up and running, now I need to buy another HDD.

[gexecuter]

i backup my stuff into a dvd every time that i re-install windows. Not the best method but it's all i have since i have only one hard drive.

that's just not good enough.

you need to establish a system for backing up your documents and data much more regularly.. maybe using a free online backup service.

i know it's a crappy system but i don't have many files that i would terribly miss if my hard drive were to fail, maybe some word documents and small stuff like that. Once i get my college degree (hopefully this year) and get a job (maybe next year) i can spend some money into a PC that has a hard drive exclusively for backup purposes.

[Innuendo]

Just had a hard drive problem myself on the same day Mouser did. My problem was more insidious and harder to diagnose, though.

A SATA cable was becoming marginally bad & was sporadically "losing" the drive. For a while I thought  I was going to have to do the "RMA a drive" thing. Man, what a pain...