Laptop meltdown

[SteveG]

Damm thing blew up on me ... lost loads of half completed projects, tools, vst's, synthfonts etc. Not happy
Got a new one now tho so back in action! Just got to catch up with everything.....

[Oldrottenhead]

sympathy to you, my pc was reset by one of the kids, luckily all my music was backed up but i lost lots, email address book all my software, and all my bloody passwords, that was a nightmare.

[Pedro]

If my computer blew up I would be really pissed of. I have a lot of music in my PC, pretty much all the original music I ever did. If it blew up, some of it would be lost forever. It's pretty sad now that I think of it. 

[64Guitars]

If my computer blew up I would be really pissed of. I have a lot of music in my PC, pretty much all the original music I ever did. If it blew up, some of it would be lost forever. It's pretty sad now that I think of it. 

As it happens, my boot hard drive died Saturday morning and I'm still trying to rescue some data from it and rebuild my dual-boot system (Ubuntu & XP). If it was just Ubuntu, it would be a lot easier. Microsoft makes things complicated because of restrictions on activation.

Same thing happened to me several years ago. Boot drive died. After that experience, I learned a valuable lesson that's worth passing on. The boot drive is constantly being accessed by the operating system and programs, so it is far more prone to failure than any other hard drives connected to your computer. So, the lesson is to not keep any important data on the boot drive. Use a secondary drive instead for your data. If your system currently has only one hard drive, buy an external USB or eSATA hard drive and use it for your songs, digital pictures, word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc. Then, if the boot drive dies, your valuable data is unaffected because it's on a different drive. This also makes upgrading your computer a lot easier. Just plug the external hard drive into the new computer and all of your data is instantly accessible. No migrating of data from the old system to the new system is necessary.

Of course, external drives can fail too, but it's much less likely since the frequency of access is much less than the boot drive.

So, if you currently have all of your BR songs and backups on your boot drive, you should seriously consider moving them to a secondary or external drive as soon as possible. And backing up your songs to CDs or whatever is also a good idea, just in case Murphy strikes and your external hard drive dies. It's much less likely for an external drive to die than it is for your boot drive to die, but it's still possible, so frequent backups are still a good idea.

[guitarron]

Agreed- been there
I've made an external usb drive drive dirt cheap. I paid $15 for the enclosure and 50 bucks for the drive-10 mins to assembly- plug it in, format-done
Excellent advise

[Pedro]

I have two hard-drives, will do that now.

[SteveG]

Yep ... I am being much more careful backing up now. Lesson well learned!