Today I had a little "excitement"
The phone rang early and I answered it to find that one of our site members had had a catastrophic failure of Windows. Now, this is normally a real inconvenience, but in this case it was even more worrying, as among other things like all the letters and family pictures, the computer in question contained the last year's bookkeeping and tax records for their farm which were due at the tax consultant's in less than four weeks.
Fortunately the computer has a proprietary operating system includes a built in Backup facility and it had been updated on to an external hard drive prior to any repair work being done.
Once I had heard the tale of woe I must admit that I was somewhat nervous as one never knows what they will find when they try to reinstate these backups. It's one of those things that we all should use, yet we hope and pray that we never have to use then as a matter of necessity, such as was the case today.
I bolted down a plate of cereal and did a quick trip to the shops as I didn't know what time I would get home, and took off for the nether regions, these poor souls actually live "off the bitumen"; just as well I have a 4WD
. upon arriving I found a somewhat worried looking lady who was trying to, do a load of washing, prepare morning tea for the shearers and worry about whether she may have lost a years worth of work.
I was shown the offending machine and commenced to have a look around to try and get some idea of exactly what had been saved, only to find that the backup is saved in a series of encrypted and compressed files that are not readily readable, so,... it looked very much like the only way to find out was to attempt to reinstate the data. I found the executable file and set it to work, much to my relief, it started decompressing a seemingly huge number of files which were wizzing past on the screen far too fast to read where they were actually being put. This went on for ten minutes or so and at last came up with the message that the Restore process had been completed.
Next I had to find the files and after a quick look around they were all found in a dedicated folder that had been created. All that remained was to re install the programs that used them and replace such things as documents and Pictures in their normal locations, this was actually the most time consuming part of the process and took several hours.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it all worked and after it was finished it seems that the only thing that was not saved was the email addresses which although an inconvenience, is not a major disaster, in fact, the owner was almost relieved as it will give her a chance to start afresh, and I know what she means, as my own address book is huge and I guarantee that 95% of the addresses are outdated or unusable. (Something that I must rectify) The other thing is that I must go and have a look how I can backup my own address book.
So, there it is boys and girls,
back up your data, one day it may save you a lot of grief.
