This will be a short and belated post. A few days ago, my ancestors became corrupt. I didn’t find them in prison or court records. I found that they were imprisoned on my computer’s hard drive. Presumably they were doing hard time.
When I would normally have been writing something genealogical, I was instead erasing a hard drive. Not something for the faint of heart, but it might have been much worse. Let’s cover the moral of the story first-
Back up your data.
If necessary, to convince yourself that this is important, follow these steps-
- Take a small USB hard drive that is not currently connected to anything.
- Hold it by the end of the cord away from the hard drive.
- Lift it so that the drive dangles at eye level.
- Set the disk gently swinging, left and right.
- Repeat quietly to yourself, “I will stop swinging this disk like a nincompoop, and instead use it to backup my data.”
- You can stop swinging the disk once your trance becomes deep enough to overcome all anti-backup inertia and actually back up your data.
The worst part of my hard disk problem was the time wasted trying to fix it some clever way. When I eventually realized that the best thing to do was to bite the bullet, take a deep breath and make use of my backups, it went fairly smoothly. I’m pretty paranoid about backing up. I have and incremental backup that is updated every hour to an array of hard drives. Even if one drive fails, the data is still there. I also have a clone that is updated daily. A clone is a special type of backup, not a new offspring type that you can set in your genealogy software. When all else fails, a clone can be used as a boot drive for starting your computer. I couldn’t start my computer from its drive but I could start it just fine from the clone. I knew of a few files that had been updated, so once I got the computer started, I could find them on my hard drive and copy them to a thumb drive, just to be sure I had them.
Then I did the scary thing. I erased my computer’s hard drive. Even if you are sure that you have everything on a back up, pressing that erase button is hard. Once it was erased, I copied my clone to it and my computer was fine. All I needed to do was to restore the few files that I had updated. Now it starts up just like normal.
Let’s repeat the moral of the story-
Back up your data.
Your flesh and blood ancestors may never have needed a “Get out of jail free” card, but you never know when your digital ancestors might become imprisoned if you don’t back up.