I did not learn the hard way. I had everything backed up as my hard drive crashed this past week.
I did however not have a current email backup since 7/22/10. My bad as I lost a lot of emails.
Lesson learned is to back up again and again. Most everyone points to my three year old surge protector that is not a surge protector after a few hits. Another lesson learned.
Computers blow. 
Those aren't surge protectors really. They are "hit by a gazillion volt lightning strike" protectors. A truly useful surge protector is called a line conditioner.
You download your emails to your local drive? 
Emails are read and deleted. Anything important is printed and filed with the job folder. Personal photos and that kind of stuff are mirrored on two different computers and a portable hard drive. Quickbooks is backed up every time I do invoicing to a flash drive. All business letter head and other important files on the office computer are mirrored on my personal computers and a flash drive. This I all learned the hard way. It's probably over kill but I never want to experience that again.
http://www.cobian.se/cobianbackup.htm
cobian backup is awesome and free.
My hard drive has no reverse gear?
funny, I don't recall ever having a hard drive fail. maybe I change computers too often.
internetautomart wrote:funny, I don't recall ever having a hard drive fail. maybe I change computers too often.
I had my last desktop for 6 years - no problems.
This one was built by one of our employee's. Nine months and the hard drive crashed........
I'm seeing it more & more on newer laptops.
I honestly fear there will be a time in the future where there will be very little photo/video record of several generations/decades from the early 2000's, especially home/personal subjects. Not just due to hard-drive crashes, but even with data backed up, how accessible will it be to people in 25-, 50-, 75-years??? Will anyone have hardware to read a DVD of pictures, or a USB 2.0 port to plug a flash drive into?
I'd imagine the data from most publishing sources is probably backed up & would remain, but I think the vast majority of "family snapshot" will be lost.
I'm going to be throwing together a little Windows Home Server here in the next month or so for the purpose of backing up the 3 home PC's, acting as a media hub, web front end and giving remote access to home files from anywhere.
pete240z wrote:internetautomart wrote:funny, I don't recall ever having a hard drive fail. maybe I change computers too often.
I had my last desktop for 6 years - no problems.
This one was built by one of our employee's. Nine months and the hard drive crashed........
that leads me to suspect bottom of barrel parts. Which reminds me I did have a hard drive fail. It was a bigfoot drive, they were a s-h-i-t design. Bad right out of the box IIRC as were its replacements.
This is why I use the cloud.
If my hardware dies, all my important documents are stored elsewhere.
