This past week we worked with one of our many commercial customers. They operate a large plant and has several servers which operate equipment in their facility.
They were not able to boot up a server which operated a BIG piece of equipment what was now holding up production.
When we built their server several years ago, we included a dual raid setup so that all of their data was mirrored on 2 hard drives. They had backup. We found a failed hard drive and in the process we also upgraded the drives from HHD hard drives to SSD solid date drives. We had them backup and running quickly.
The new SSD drives allow the machine to boot up quicker now. So instead of hitting the power button, walking away for at least 10 minutes and then coming back to get to work, they are able to start working almost immediately after hitting the power button. The server boots up that fast with the faster SSD hardware.
This brings up the need for you to have backup, and today’s World Backup Day.
Without that data being backed up, they wouldn’t have been able to use that piece of equipment for days. They would have lost a lot of money in lost production.
We talk to customers all the time who have either noticed their computers are running really slow or won’t even turn on.
During a technical diagnosis we find that their hard drive is about to crash, or has already crashed, and the computer isn’t going to boot up.
Then comes THE QUESTION from the customer… “What about my files?”
Our response to the question, “Do you have your important files backed up on an external drive or in the cloud?”
Then from the customer… silence.
In some cases we’re able to recover the data, in some cases we can only recover partial data, in some cases it’s impossible to recover the data without you spending a lot of money.
This is 2017. Computers have been around for years. Computer hard drives do not last forever. They will fail. They will usually fail at the time you least expect it. Especially in laptops which have hard drives. You should always have your files backed up somewhere. The cost of external USB drives are less than $100 now. Cloud based filed storage, which is secure and better solution as it is off-site (in case your house with your computer burns to the ground) has nominal annual fees.
You need to have a good plan to have your files backed up all the time. Plus it’s good to have several layers to not only recover your important data files but also make sure they are kept safe.
Technology has now brought us solid state drives that are slowly replacing the hard drive. In new computers, both desktops and laptops, we recommend replacing them with solid state drives, unless you are doing a lot of video or photo editing, or gaming.
“Don’t be an April Fool. Backup your files and check your restores on March 31st.”
And if you need help with a backup device or solutions we can help.
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