Backups: My "uh oh" moment and what I do now for prevention and recovery

End users generally think, "I've saved the document, I'm all good". They put it into the computer and it'll always be there, ready for when they need it.

My "uh oh" wake up moment with regards to data integrity and backups was a long time ago now. It all started with an Athlon 1.4 system I built for myself. I also built a similarly equipped unit for my parents. Both from parts I purchased at a computer "swap meet" (very rarely these days involving any actual swapping). They both consisted of an MSI motherboard, the AMD CPU, RAM, Sony CD Burner, an ASmart Nvidia based AGP4x card, Creative SoundBlaster Live (which would later fail and make everything sound like cartoon chipmunks), a cheap PSU that came with the case ("Hairong"??), Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and an IBM hard disk - a 40GB DeskDeathstar (I can sense some of you out there groaning now).

Previously to this, I'd used several machines with several types of hard disk (Maxtor, Seagate, WD, Fujitsu etc.) and never had a problem. I hadn't yet suffered a drive failure and so never really considered it would be a problem.

Well, I copped the Deathstar curse.. bad!