Post edited 11:10 am – November 11, 2011 by Craig Chamberlin

Well, I woke up this morning and came into work, it was like any other day, but my boss man comes into the office and says "My computer is having problems, Windows will not boot."

So I go into his office and, sure enough, there it is, stick on the "boot menu" where you can select whether to boot in safe mode, last known good configuration (does that ever work?) or normally. After trying all three to no avail, I knew more troubleshooting would be at hand.

After swapping the memory, no luck, then attempting a safe mode with networking, still no luck, I pulled the hard drive and stuck it in an identical machine we had. Thankfully, it was another Dell Dimension 3000 – allowing me to simply plug in the drive and boot it up… still no luck.

The hard drive had failed, and he had critical system files on it.

The most do not know, is I have a backup strategy lined up for these situations, unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to IMPLEMENT this backup strategy. Now, the hard drive has failed and all of his business critical files are on it. What was my option? Well, I could grab a USB adapter to convert his drive into an external and attempt a manual recovery of the files, but I would rather bring it to a company that has a hard drive stripper and backup recovery suite… I'm to hear from them in a couple hours as to whether or not the data is recoverable (shh, don't tell my boss) – it probably is.

The moral of the story? This could happen to you! There are completely free backup utilities out there, that will help get you setup with backing up your critical system files to another drive or even a USB thumb drive. Your backup solution doesn't have to be PERFECT, it just needs to exist. Don't set yourselves up for failure – get them backed up, and get them backed up today.

Remember, a $20 investment could save you hours of headaches or a complete loss of your most important pictures, music, movies and files.