Before I got LouBackup, I used to do my backups manually (ie, copying and pasting folders). Of course, because it was so much trouble, I didn’t do it very often, and eventually my external hard drive, on which I store all my documents (I have “My Documents” pointed to my external hard drive), failed. I tried various pieces of software, until eventually I found one that managed to find nearly everything. Though it found everything, I had to buy it to actually recover the files. The program is File Scavenger. It couldn’t recover my most recent files, presumably those written to the drive when it was already damaged, but I managed to recover them all anyway, because all my recent files were translation jobs, and I don’t delete any e-mails so I could just download them from the messages I had sent to or received from my clients.

While on this issue, my flatmate recently bought a pen drive from a colleague of mine. She thought she had lost some files, so I ran File Scavenger on my computer. I didn’t find her files, since she had actually used a different pen drive, but I did find lots of documents belonging to the previous owner, some of which may have been confidential. So be warned that just deleting files (even from the Recycle Bin) does not actually physically delete the files from the disk. Nor does formatting a disk. If you really need to make sure data is completely removed from a disk you should use special software.

One last tip. Depending on how important your data is, it’s probably a good idea to have regular backups made on other premises. Imagine your house catches fire and not only your computer burns but also all of your backups.

Anyway, good to see you blogging again. In my list of RSS feeds for blogs, I have six blogs that are “on hold”. It would seem that Facebook has taken over blogging as the latest craze. Though personally I find blogging much more interesting.