That sickening, sinking feeling you get when you've just turned on your machine, and it won't boot up; that queasy rush the moment you realize your machine is dead or dying; the hoping, waiting, craving for everything to be right when you press the reset button and watch the screen turn dark and then light again... Sound familiar? Have you ever had a virus attack your machine, or a hard drive crash, or a mother board die? I've had all three happen to me at one time or another, and the feeling is simply awful. However, it is tempered by one very important fact: my hard drives are fully backed up, and at worst, I'll have to reload everything onto a newly formatted hard drive. That might take a few hours of my time while my relatively slow 250 meg tape drive copies everything back.

A few times each year, I get a frantic call from a friend or client about their computer that's "not working right...". Frequently, after a brief interview or an examination of their machine, I have to tell them that their hard drive is gone, and that they'll have to restore from a backup. And invariably, their response is "I don't have a backup." No matter how many times I encounter this situation, I'm astonished.

A friend of my wife's has a business doing research and writing applications for medical grants. Her entire business rests on the content of her WordPerfect® documents. She spends days and weeks poring over research materials and drafting these long, detailed files. When I first helped her set up her machine, I created a very simple batch script that would copy her document directory onto floppies, and added that task to a rudimentary menu program that she sees whenever she boots up. My intent was that at least she'd have backups of the most critical aspect of her business if things went awry. Since she's a complete technophobe, I wouldn't even suggest the possibility of running a more sophisticated backup program (she's still running WordPerfect 5.0 under DOS; Windows was "too scary" for her). After an electrical storm some time ago, her computer failed, and I tried to restore the directories and data using every tool in my extensive toolbox, and was completely unsuccessful. A power surge had fried most of her computer, including the mother board, the hard disk controller, and the drive itself. Well, at least she had the backups, I thought. But foolish me, I was being incredibly naive. She hadn't run the backup script in over two years. And a project that she was just finishing, after three months' of work, was completely and irretrievably lost. Needless to say, she now runs a backup to tape every week (I check up on her) and occasionally more frequently.

Another friend of mine never made backups of his hard drive either. His excuse was that he "had all the original software, and didn't really use the machine for anything critical", so he could always just reinstall everything if necessary. Well, when his hard drive crashed, he called to tell me that after reinstalling everything (which took a whole morning), his communications software still didn't work, and many of his son's games didn't work either. Of course not. These things had been upgraded with drivers and other enhancements that weren't on the original disks. It took us a week to figure out what was missing, and get it reinstalled. Another convert was made: he now backs up regularly.

What's my point here? Just this: WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET FOLKS TO REALIZE THAT THEY HAVE TO BACK UP BEFORE THEIR SYSTEM CRASHES? How many horror stories like these do they have to read? How many warnings from professionals? How many ads for a zillion types of backup software and hardware do they have to see? What does it take? I don't know, and I don't think I'll ever know.

The way I currently handle this situation is to simply present the following little scenario to my friends and clients when I'm helping them first set up a new machine:

You're working long into the night, finally finishing that business proposal you've worked on for weeks. You go to save it before printing, just to be safe. A General Protection Fault error message box appears on the screen. You click "OK". Nothing happens. The keyboard is locked. You press the reset switch. The ROM test finishes, you see the hard drive light go on....and then nothing. You reboot again, and again...nothing. You boot from the floppy. Fine. You go to read your hard drive. "Drive Not Recognized" flashes on the dark DOS screen. You try Norton, PC Tools, and finally, you call me. And I will ask you - I PROMISE you I will - "Have you backed up your hard drive?" And when you say "No", I'll say, "Then I can't help you. Goodnight."

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