I’ve you’ve never been unlucky enough to have gone through a hard drive crash and major loss of data I envy you. I might be luckier than some as I’ve only experienced complete hard drive failure once and that was due to a computer virus.

All I can say is that if you’ve never experienced this you’re lucky and whether you have or haven’t had a hard drive failure you should take some basic steps to prevent hard drive failure or to make recovering your data a fairly easy task.

Some obvious ways of protecting your computer and your data are:

1. Keep your software up to date by upgrading using the latest stable release.

2. Use an anti-virus program to protect your computer.

3. Never open a file that arrives in your email if it’s from someone that you don’t know, if you weren’t expecting the attachment or if it seems suspicious in any way.

4. Backup your data to another hard drive, server, external drive, CD or DVD regularly.

There are many reasons why your hard drive might fail. Power failure is another reason, as is visiting a website that infects your computer with malicious code. However, in my opinion, failing to do some or all of the above mentioned suggestions are probably the number one reasons that lead to hard drive failure.

I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to friends, relatives, coworkers or web friends and they’ve told me that their hard drive crashed or some of the programs that they rely on most won’t work anymore. When I ask them if they have a recent backup or if they use an anti virus program more often than not they say no.

Hard drive failure is bad enough for the home computer user, but if the hard drive failure occurs on a business computer or servers hard drive it could mean downtime, loss of income and loss of valuable company data.

For those who’s hard drives have failed and they are unfortunate enough not to have a backup of their data, or perhaps had a backup failure as well as a crashed hard drive there are companies such as DTI Data that specialize in hard drive recovery. Not only is DTI DATA the only manufacturer authorized data recovery company to provide flat rate pricing for hard drive recovery, but they also have a fantastic data guarantee:

If DTI DATA fails to recover your data you don’t pay!

That claim does come with an exception. If your hard drive was opened elsewhere the guarantee doesn’t apply.

DTI Data can perform hard drive repair on many types of hard drives and servers. For example they offer services for SCSI Hard Drive repair and recovery, Exchange Server Recovery, RAID Data Recovery, laptop hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive recovery and even adaptive logic hard drive recovery for those who sent their hard drive to another company for repair before trying DTI Data.

Data recovery and hard drive repair takes place in a class 100 clean room.

DTI Data also offers a number of Data Recovery Resources such as do it yourself recovery software that has been developed in house.

You’ll find software that can be purchased on their website that will help you recover all of the data on your hard drive, assist in recovering lost digital pictures, CD/CDRW DVD/DVDRW drive data recovery, fast file undelete, e-Recovery for Outlook Express and Outlook as well as other forms of data recovery software.

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a hard drive failure visit the site and fill out their online quote form or call their toll free number to talk with one of their hard drive recovery specialists.

Considering that I just completed a post discussing how important it is to prepare your site properly and backup files prior to upgrading your blogs installation of Wordpress I thought it might be interesting to tell you about an article that discusses the history of backup.

Data can easily be corrupted when new software is installed, when a virus is introduced to the system or when there is a power failure or power surge. A mangled line of code due to any of the above causes or any of the multitude of other sources of corrupt data can cause companies to lose sales and man power hours during the time it takes to find the source of the problem. Likewise, corrupt data on a home computer can cause a lot of woe too.

That’s why regularly backing up data is so important. A backup is essentially a copy of working files or intact data. Did you know that some of the first backups were done on either big reels of magnetic tape, paper or paper tape? Those first backups occurred in the 1950’s.

We’ve come a long way since then!

While it’s true that some backups are still done on tape backup most data backups now occur on hard drives, flash hard drives, CDs and DVDs and even via network.

The article that I referred to earlier, The History of Backup, discusses how backup has evolved and how the equipment and gadgets that we use to perform data backup have changed over the years.

It’s actually quite an interesting article. You can see how demand for better data backup spurred the invention of a wide variety of data backup devices and how as the demand rose the price of this technology eventually fell into reasonably inexpensive products that even the average home computer user can afford.

Whether your an occasional at home computer user or someone who relies heavily on your computer for business there’s no denying how important it is to back up your vital files regularly. All it takes is a computer virus or a power failure and your data could be lost forever.

While there are many back up programs that you could use I think you might agree that Backup Platinum has quite a few useful features.

Backup Platinum allows you to back up your data to pretty much any type of storage medium meaning you could store your valuable backup data on another computer, a network, an external drive, an FTP server or even a CD or DVD.

Not only that, you can set up regular backups using the program wizard in order to define what is backed up, where it’s backup from, how to back up your data and when those backups should take place.

If you chose to backup your data onto a CD or DVD you can use a rewritable disk. The program can be set up so that any data on the disk is erased prior transferring new backup data. This means that you could set the Backup Platinum program to create a new backup each night and only the latest backup would be on your rewritable CD or DVD.

Backups can be kept small and secure thanks to the programs 128-bit encryption with Blowfish and multichoice ZIP. Also, if you happen to have a lot of data to backup the backup can be split into several parts which would make it easer to transfer your finished backup data elsewhere if needed.

One thing that I like about this program is that it creates detailed logs of all operations and if something goes wrong with your backup you can easily restore with a simple click of a button.

Backup Platinum has been specifically designed to work on Windows operating systems.

If you’d like to try Backup Platinum you can download a limited 30 day trial version. Then if you like the programs features you can purchase the license for a full copy.

Well I’m still trying to figure out my web hosting CPU resource over usage problems. I’ve got a lot of great suggestions from people on forums and via comments on my sites.

One person asked if I’m using WP-Cache on my wordpress blogs and the answer is yes. I’ve been using it since last Friday and I’ve still been getting messages from my web host saying that my cpu resource usage is too high.

This is depressing!

If I ever figure out what caused the problem I’ll be sure to write about it on my sites so that others might be able to get themselves out of this mess a little quicker than I’ve managed.

Well, I’m not out of the mess yet.

I’ve finished updating everything I can think of including a joomla installation that runs one of my other sites. I think the Joomla CMS might be one of the causes of the problem. I guess I’ll find out later today when I hear from my web host. I hope that the resources are back to normal.

I wrote out more details of how I’m using the servers on my other tech blog WebStyle if you’d care to read that post. Perhaps those of you that have been through this before or know a little something about this kind of problem could read that post and offer a few suggestions? I’d really appreciate it if you would.

Also, just in case I do end up having to move to a Virtual Private Server … how difficult is that to work with? I’m pretty good about figuring out stuff but I’d like to know if I’m going to end up with a VPS headache before I make my decision to move off shared hosting.

I got a note yesterday evening from my webhost stating that my sites were using too much of their resources. Most of our sites are fairly well visited but I don’t believe they are so well visited that they would begin causing CPU problems on my web host just yet.

So, I’ve been going over all our sites for the last few hours turning off any plugins that aren’t vital and ones that I think might use CPU. For example I had viewcounter and postrater activated on two of our sites and since they store info in the database I thought that they might be using the hosts CPU so it was worth turning them off.

I’ve also downloaded a copy of WP-Cache that I’m going to be installing in a few minutes. This caches a page when it’s first viewed and then presents the cached copy the next time it’s viewed and doesn’t create a new cache copy of the page until data on the page changes or I think until a certain amount of time has passed. If this works properly it should cut down on the amount of resources that my sites are using.

I’m also going to update my Google Sitemaps plugin as the latest Beta version has been optimized to use fewer CPU resources.

I’m crossing my fingers that this works.

In the meantime my host has moved my sites to a different server on their network. I’m not sure the move went well because once I got to this blog I noticed that when I tried to click on the titles of the posts I got an error message. I hope they didn’t mess up my database!

That’s one reason why I’m writing a post now. I’m hoping the new post will update my database and fix whatever’s going on with the rest of the posts. I sure hope it does, and I also hope that this posts when I publish it!

If anyone has been put on notice by their webhost that their site is overusing CPU resources how did you resolve the problem? Any suggestions?