Yesterday my mom called me who lives in Colorado and told me that she couldn't boot into windows. I told her to try some things like booting into safe mode, etc. To no avail the computer wouldn't boot into windows. So I told her to take the computer to Dave and have him look at. Dave is a friend of mine that I knew when I lived back home and has his own Computer sales and service business he does part-time and he is also the systems administrator for a chain of lumber stores so he is extremely competent in what he does. So long store short is when he says the hard drive is pretty much shot it is probably pretty much shot.

He said he ran Maxtor's diagnostic software and it wouldn't even begin to fix the drive and that he also ran Spinrite 6.0 which ran for over 3 hours and covered less than 1% of the hard drive due to bad sectors.

I did some asking around to some tech friends who recommend trying File Scavenger. But no matter what data recovery software you use if the hard drive is bad physically it's going to be pretty hard to recover the data unless you take the hard drive apart and replace parts like the hard drive controller.

So what is the long and short of this story? Backup! Backup! My mom had visited us in April for my son's first birthday and at the time she saw my external hard drive and she asked what I was using it for and I told her it made a backup of all my personal data files every night. Her response was that she thought she needed to get an external hard drive so that she could do the same thing. And needless to say from what you've read so far she put off buying it and now her hard drive has crashed. So my hope in taking some time to write this article is that I can save some people the trouble of trying to recover lost data on a crashed hard drive.

I had a hard drive crash a couple weeks ago while I was building a new computer. Some how in the physical transfer from one computer to the other the hard drive must have picked up some static electricity or something and messed up the hard drive so it wouldn't boot. Luckily, I practice what I preach and I backup my data every night and nothing was lost, which brings me to my montra, "Backup! Backup!" I've also heard it said that it isn't a question of if a hard drive will go bad it's more like when will the hard drive go bad. So if it can happen to me, my mother and even Khoi Vinh it can happen to you! So don't just sit their Backup your hard drive!

How?

How you ask? There have to be about 50 billion different backup solutions out there to choose from, the trick is trying to pick the solution that is right for you and your work flow. I've been backing up my data since I first got a computer of my own. Back then I would copy all my new data to 3 1/2 inch floppy disks every week. After I got my first CD ROM burner I started backing up my data to CD's once in awhile. But the problem with that is that when I'm really busy I neglect my backup duties so if something were to go wrong I would be royally up a creek.

In recent years my solution for backing up has change quite considerably. Since hard drives are so cheep these days, I decided the best thing for me was to buy 3 hard drives. Some people are probably thinking that having 3 hard drives sounds crazy... wait and here me out for a second. On my setup at home I install two internal hard drives in my main computer. The first hard drive I use to install my operating systems (*caugh* Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux). The second internal hard drive is installed on the same computer and is used as my data drive. My data drive is where I store all my personal files like papers, photos, music, art work, etc. The reason that I do it this way is because most of the time a hard drive is going to go bad on the hard drive that your operating system is on. This way if my hard goes bad that I installed my operating systems on all I have to do is reinstall the operating systems again and then go on my marry way. But what if my second hard drive goes bad you ask? Well that's where my third hard drive that I mentioned comes in. My third hard drive is an external hard drive that is connected to my main computer at home via USB 2.0. I use this third hard drive to backup my data drive. And not only do I backup my data drive but I also backup files from my PowerBook and my wife's computer. My wife just usually saves her files on my main computer over the network and then every night the data files are backed up to the external hard drive.

Create Your rysnc Bash Script

I backup my files every night to my external hard drive using a program called rsync. It's a free program that comes on most Linux distrobutions but also comes with cygwin. Cygwin is a linux command line enviroment which runs on Windows. Once you have cygwin installed all you need to do is create bash script that contains the rsync command that is used backup your data files. I created my script in "My Documents" under a "scripts" directory that I created. Create a text file in that directory that will be your bash script. I named my script "my-documents-backup.sh". Edit that file and use the following example as a guide for your script.

#!/bin/bash

# The following line copies all new files to the external hard drive
# and deletes any files that not longer exist on the date drive.
#
# /cygdrive/d/ is my data hard drive and /cygdrive/g/ is my external
# hard drive
/bin/rsync --delete -az /cygdrive/d/ /cygdrive/g/backup/my-docs/

# The follow is used to back up my windows xp home folder which has
# program settings as well as any files that might be on my desktop
/bin/rsync --delete -az
/cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/my-user-name/
/cygdrive/g/backup/home-folder/

Create a Batch File to Run your Script Nightly?

The next thing to do is create a batch file that will run your bash script every night. Just create another file in your scripts directory and name it "my-documents-backup.bat". Edit that file and use following example as a guide for what to put in your bash script.

C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe "D:\scripts\my-documents-backup.sh"

Save the file and then open Windows "Scheduled Tasks" (Start > Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks). Double click on Add Scheduled Task and follow the prompts. Click next and then browse to the location of your batch file you created. Choose daily to run the task daily and then click next and choose the time you want the task to run. Then choose next and enter your user name and password that you want the task to run as and then click finish. That's it!

It should be noted that rsync works on just about any platform including OSX and Linux. I also use rsync to backup files off my web server to my main home computer.