The importance of BACKUP

I can never stress the importance of a backup enough.

The same person that had the partition resize issue that other day was having problems starting an application.

It turned out that a while back he had a severe system issue and basically the fix was to reinstall windows on a new drive (smaller though), and instead of reinstalling (or even moving some software folders) the client’s software, they had just placed a short cut to it on the desktop and had the short cut linked into the programs folder on the old drive.

It would have definitely spelt disaster should no one be thinking straight. But, I was.

I realised that we had formatted that old drive, the person believed they had never actually accessed data on that drive and believed that there was no need for them to leave that data sitting there.

The problem was that one application he had so many uses (was pretty critical, never known this person to swear!), was formatted as a result of the users lack of knowing the application was sitting on the old drive.

As far as he knew, F: was an old drive no longer needed, and I would have assumed rightly so too, given that it was old windows, and the user stated he hadn’t a need to access data there in a while.

When you flatten a system and rebuild it, don’t be lazy about it, do a proper job, install the applications (or copy the program’s program file’s sub folder) to the system drive, so at least, when the next person comes by and needs to change things, … they can do so somewhat safely.

All was not lost here however, a fantastic tool, Runtime Software’s Get Data back for NTFS, came to the rescue again, recovering data from a formatted, and written over drive. The good news here is the drive was split into two, and the data writes had occurred at the end of the disk, leaving the first part of the disk.. idle. And a recovery of data on a formatted disk took about 1 hour and a bit.

Enjoy!