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[CodenStuff]

Hello,

Between 4-5 months ago my computer went kaput, more specifically my hard-drive just failed and died on me, and stupidly I hadn't backed up any of my work up which meant I lost pretty much everything I've been working on for the last few years. Once upon a time I would back things up on to DVDs and more recently on to memory sticks/cards but because I upgraded my computer last year and with everything else that was going on in my life I forgot/didn't have time to do it...obviously I was gutted at losing everything.

Thankfully I'd posted a lot of my projects source-code here on the site which meant I was able to get some of work back and the rest, well, it was important work but I can always reproduce it when I have the time, it would take a lot of time but it can be done.

I just wanted to make sure you're all aware of just how important it is to back-up your work, not just your projects but anything that is important or irreplaceable.

Thanks to Windows 10 I can now back-up my work easily, I take no chances and have already synced my project folders and other important folders to my Onedrive account which means anything I work on in the future will be automatically saved to the cloud just in case. I also back-up regularly to both my flash drive and external hard-drive.

My tips are:
Get a flash/external drive or both
Sync your files to Onedrive or another online storage provider
Back-up on a regular basis

Don't think "I'll back it all up tomorrow, can't be bothered now." because what if you turn your computer on tomorrow and your drive fails.

Leave nothing to chance...back-up, back-up, back-up

[comathi]

That's unfortunate to hear, I've had a couple of data losses here and there, but never with important files. Hopefully you'll be able to recover the most important stuff one way or another.

If I can make a quick recommendation, it's to consider purchasing a network attached storage device (NAS). I've got a 4TB one at home (perhaps overkill, but it's shared amongst 4 people). Not only does it allow you to move your computer around while keeping your files backed up (if you're on a laptop), but you can back up multiple devices each to their own "shares" or folders. The one I've got also supports streaming and public cloud, but there are many models out on the market.

Best of luck!

[smashapps]

One company I work for has 30 years of documents stored on their computers.
My job is to make sure nothing can happen to these files, their business would
fail if they were to lose everything. I always back-up and I also keep a cloud backup.

[benji_19994]

A raspberry pi would make a nice little nas backup server

[smashapps]

A raspberry pi would make a nice little nas backup server

What is a nas backup server?

[benji_19994]

Network attached storage device so you can have all the files on you pc sync to a raspberry pi or even an old PC running linux. Heres some links

http://lifehacker.com/5988835/turn-a-ra ... -power-nas

http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspber ... box-clone/