As I was trying to install some RAM into our main gaming/media computer, something happened. I’ve installed RAM enough to know how to do it right, but now the computer won’t turn on and the power LED is flashing. Long story short, everything points to a bad power-supply. The fact that this started when I put in new RAM may be a coincidence, who knows.

All of our important files are stored below a single directory with a very clean hierarchical structure, and a perfect naming convention. From our taxes to Collin photos, everything I’ve ever had to keep is in this directory. Merlyn’s kitten records? It’s under
Documents/Animals/Merlyn/Records. Need that javascript I wrote in 2000 for the Mayors Office? It’s under Documents/Apache/Clients/OMVK/Javascripts. You get the idea. This folder is organized to the point of border-line OCD for two reasons:

• It makes it easy to find what you’re looking for.
• It makes it super-easy to backup.

Luckily, this directory was backed up the night before the crash, so I knew that everything that had been archived before that day was safe and sound on my linux server, here in the office. However, there were some Collin pictures, scanned documents, and various files that had not yet been archived. In case the hard drive of the gaming machine is damaged when we replace the power supply or even the motherboard (unlikely, but possible), I had to get those items back asap.

I took out the hard drive and stuck it into my linux machine as a secondary drive. I booted linux, mounted that windows partition, and used the terminal to copy over those files.

I downloaded those extra files to my laptop (my main Windows machine used for everything except gaming/media stuff). Tonight I’ll download all of my previous archives and music.

This means that just one full day after I lost the ability the boot my main PC, I will have everything available on my laptop. Not a single Collin picture lost. All it took was about two hours of moving the hard drive back and forth.

If it had been a total failure and that hard drive was destroyed, the only thing we would have lost was a days-worth of Boo pics. Everything else we hadn’t shredded yet, so I could simply scan them again. Whew!

Trust me, you need to backup your stuff!