My computer decided to kill itself 2 weeks ago, which was a very bad time for it to die, seeing as my only source of income was a video tutorial I was working on. Directly after my recording; before I was able to start editing, my computer blue screened. After rebooting, I wasn’t able to get into XP, or even safe mode. After a bout of quiet sobbing, I tore apart my machine, testing each component. Some short testing confirmed that my hard drive was definitely the cause, so I grabbed my mom’s machine, and plugged in my corrupted SATA drive. It was at this point that I noticed that my moms machine didn’t have enough power connectors to set up my drive, so I had to put her machine on my desk, and run cables from each tower to my poor little drive. After getting power from my machine, and communication through my moms machine, I was ready to see if any of my data could be saved.

2 Boxes running in parallel

I sat through a lengthy checkdisk and then I was greeted with my mom’s desktop. I started digging through my files, and saw that my video files and game files were intact, so I quickly moved them over to her hard drive. After a day of searching through my unorganized mess of files, I found that I could not recover any of my recent downloads, or any of my notes/pictures on game development that I’ve collected for a year or so. Very depressing, but at least my game files and video tutorial were safe.

I reinstalled Windows, got updated drivers and updates for all of my development programs, and now my machine is back in business. I shot off some emails and got my video tutorial submitted, which is good news for me, because my internet would have been cut off if I didn’t come up with some quick money. Let this be a lesson for any readers here…

Back up your files frequently!

I’ve always felt that I’ve kept decent backups before. I have an external hard drive where I’ll often toss a copy of my current development folder to. However, once I had lost my data, I realized that these half-ass’d backups weren’t enough. I’m looking at an applicated called Acronis True Image, but I’m open to any suggestions if you have any. Just leave a comment!