Back up or (nearly) die

The other day, I turned on my home PC (Windows XP) and was greeted by a DOS-looking screen telling me that Windows wouldn't load and asking if I wanted to try anyway or boot into safe mode. Both choices resulted in a new boot cycle that ended with the same screen of death.

I was able to reinstall windows into the same drive partition, get the system to run, and perform backups. Even if I was unable to do that, I would have lost little or nothing because I back up files and e-mail to an external hard drive three times a week. After that, I did a clean install and the system works like new. Although I lost no data, I still spend many hours installing programs and drivers and tweaking the system back to is pre-crash condition.

My word to use is the same three times, back up, back up, and back up. If you don't have an external hard drive, get one. I have a 160 GB external drive that cost me a total of $60 ($30 for the drive after rebates and $30 for the USB enclosure). I learned the hard way. the last time I had a crash, i lost less than 1% of my files but some were critical and I paid dearly.

Another good way to back up critical data files is the install a USB flash drive in your system and leave it there. Then, put shortcuts to it from every necessary folder so you can make quick backups. I do that for a few files that if I can't afford to lose.

What caused the problem? I suspect it was uninstalling a little-known CD/DVD burning software package. I uninstalled it because it produced poor-quality CDs.

I'm sure you have your own PC horror stories, so comment away.