Many years ago, I was a senior systems analyst for a fortune 500 company.
I wrote applications that ran on mainframe computers.
There was a new craze taking hold among middle managers of buying their own personal desktop computers that they then wanted to interface with stuff running on the mainframes.
Since I was one of the few people who had built and run my own computer at home, I was the guy who had to figure out what was happening when (not if) these guys ran into problems.
When the first IBM/Windows machines showed up due to an influx of good old boys into upper management who had previously worked for IBM, things got interesting fast.
People who knew little about computers now had them on their desks and frequently scrambled their data.
They each had to learn the hard way at least once and then bought a back up system.
The thing is that they all assumed that installing said system and going through what they understood to be the process to safely back up their machines made them safe.
They never experimented with restoring from the system that they bought.
In many cases, when the inevitable failure occurred, they discovered that they had not used it right and actually had no back up.
The most annoying situations were the ones who thought they knew what they were doing and took my advice and made more than one back up.
It was really frustrating when they then crashed their system and tried to restore using both back up disks before calling me.
By that time, they had made the same mistake that wiped the original data twice with the back up in the drive and wiped them out also.
The point of all this is that if you do a back up and have no experience with restoring from it or testing that the back up is valid, YOU HAVE NO BACK UP!
If your data is critical, please do experiment with another machine until you can restore your data in your sleep.
The time to learn is not after the crash.
OK, I am stepping off of my soap box.
Rant over.
