As we all know, computing is never fault free and when it comes to hard drives (or other system components?) it is more a matter of when they will spit the dummy and not if they will.

Then of course there is human error :-( . It's the latter component that I have recently suffered from.

However the good news for me is that I had some things in place that meant that I had access to at least 80% of my material and I may yet get back the full 100%.

It seems I was fortunate enough to have so many problems and reinstalls with Windows 95 that I switched to NT quite a while back. At that time it was necessary to partition a drive larger than 4GB so that the operating system was running in a maximum 4GB partition.

I figured if I had to have the operating system in one partition that as a precaution I would create a new “My Documents” folder in the other partition. I reasoned that if anything ever happened to the partition with the OS, I would still have the documents.

Down the track I had a second drive installed and ended up using Windows 2000. This time I still used the old 4GB partition but I also installed the operating system on the second drive and set the system up as multiboot. I had the choice on start up to choose which drive to boot into.

I also copied all of My Documents onto the second drive as well as my Outlook pst file (this is the heart of Outlook and has all of the database - Calendar, Email and all).

So just recently I lost access to my C: drive. I cannot boot into it and it has a l-o-t of stuff on it as you might imagine, however, because I had followed th above prodedures I am up and running again.

So here is the tip:

If you are setting up a new PC of if you have lots of space on your hard drive that is unused, set up a second (or even third) partion. If you can also set it up with its own operating system then so much the better.

Copy all of your My Documents frequently to the second partition and also back up to CD if you can.

Apart from My Documents also make copies of your Favourites folder and any database that you use for email or customer management. If you have downloaded programs or scripts or anything else of value that may not be in My Documents then also copy those to the other partition.

Now if things go wrong you can be up and running pretty quickly again apart from reinstalling commonly used programs. If you can also install these on your second partition. The idea is to have the second partition as functional as possible as a drive that you can get up and running relatively quickly.

Of course there is a lot more that can be done to protect your data such as investing in an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) and surge protection for example and also having a good back up routine in place, but the above approach may one day save you from a lot of worry as well as saving you a bundle of money by reducing the time that you are out of action.

Noel Springer
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