Crash, bang, whallop!

Last week I had a phone call from Arend Kuester of Publishers Communications Group to discuss the programme for the Success in East and Central Europe seminar that we will be holding on 3 October 2008. Arend was apologizing for a delay in finalizing the speaker line up because his hard disk had crashed and he'd had to have the data professionally recovered... I admitted that my own back-up regime hadn't been all that it should be lately and Arend urged me to back-up my data as soon as I could.

The very next day - and before I'd been able to follow Arend's advice - my laptop crashed as I was booting it up to do some work while I waited for a meeting to start. You've guessed it - when I reboot, the computer can't find the disk drive and I'm getting the ominous 'click of death' from the drive.

Unlike Arend, my disk drive was totally caput and even a specialist data recovery company was unable to recover a single byte...

Now most of my data was backed-up but reconstructing my files - and particularly my e-mail - was much, much more painful than it would have been had I regularly backed up... so if you are in a similar boat, working for a small company or acting as a sole trader and responsible for your own back-up then heed the advice from Arend and now from me - BACK-UP!

Please note that I may not have been able to recover 100% of my MS Outlook diary appointments so if I have a meeting scheduled with you I would be very grateful if you could re-confirm it with me; better safe than sorry!