Back up all your files now!

Last week was a nightmare for me as I had quite  lot to do and when I fired up my ageing desktop I was given the 'choice' of fixing the damage to my hard disk and losing all my files!! The upgrade to Windows 10 from 7 must have been a bridge too far for my faithful old warhorse. After a visit to PC World I was advised by Vladimir that if I repeatedly hit the F8 key when I switched on my computer, I might be 'allowed' a safe period in which I could extract all the files that I hadn't backed up. I followed his advice to the letter, managed to get a safe load and never switched the computer off for the rest of the week - phew!

When I worked at Nestlé a computer crash was an inconvenience, when you have your own business it can be catastrophic. A year ago I went down the Office 365 subscription route so all my work files are automatically backed up into the cloud. All my photos (17k) are backed up in the massive storage I have on Google Photos plus an external drive for extra safe keeping. So far so good, but there were a number of very important files I had missed.

• My Outlook data files plus archives were too big to do regular cloud backups, so I have to regularly back them up onto an external hard drive. I hadn't done this and the loss of all my folders and correspondence would have been a nightmare.

• I didn't realise it but my web sites assets were scattered all over my old computer and the web sites would have have been inoperable based on the back ups I had made. So I was able using Serif WebPlus X8 to save all components as a package and then reopen on my new computer.

• After chatting to a Microsoft expert I realised that I was using their OneDrive cloud system as my sole back up of important files. The expert stressed OneDrive is aimed at giving you access to all your files wherever you are and on any computer, but still routinely do your backups to an external hard disk.

• I had all the programme disks for my specialist programmes, but all the software keys were in my Outlook folders so that was a great save. I now have all the keys safely stored away on the software vendors web sites.

I bought a HP Pavillion all-in-one and logged on to my Microsoft account, and with OneDrive integrated into Windows 10 it just put all my files onto my new computer. It took two days of downloads but I was very impressed. In fact the whole operation went very smoothly apart from getting my email system working. I just couldn't send emails, then on one of the morning there was a big update of Windows 10 and after that everything worked like a dream. What I like about IMAP for my emails is it is fully synchronised to my Oulook app on my iPad. 

I believe I had a very lucky break (thanks Vlad) and would like to encourage anyone reading this to BACKUP ALL YOUR FILES NOW!!!