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Your computer crashed: Now what?

When it comes to protecting your computer systems, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. March 10, 2003.

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Technology is a two-edged sword. It can increase productivity or wipe it out completely.

So what happens when your computer crashes and you haven't backed up your files?

You can reboot the system and hope it returns to life with your data still intact.

If that doesn't work, your vendor should be able to get your system back online. But then you'll have to call a data-recovery company to attempt to recover the data you lost.

If that fails, you're out of luck.

You can try to reconstruct the data off paper records, but you'll probably be able to reconstruct only a fraction of what you lost.

That's why it's essential to back up your files and implement other preventive measures to minimize disruption.

Here are some problem areas and some suggestions on how to thwart Murphy's Law (which, by the way, derives from a technological headache involving a 1949 Air Force test project and an engineer named Edward A. Murphy Jr.)

To make sure no bugs get into his computer, Joe Schwenkler, MD, bought some RAID.

When a storage system is protected by RAID -- redundant array of independent disks -- the server behind a computer system has multiple disks that provide built-in data backup in case a hard drive gets fried.

Having some kind of system for creating and saving copies of files is the key to making sure you don't lose data. Dr. Schwenkler, a family physician in Neshanic Station, N.J., also does daily backups of his three-physician practice's database on two computers and a weekly backup on a laptop.