COMPUTER TIPS FEBRUARY 1996
Ron Sodos
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Preventing Crashes
When you change the oil in a car you are performing routine maintenance
that if left undone indefinitely will cause permanent damage. In my
consulting business I have been to numerous real estate offices here in
Albuquerque. Most of the clients I have visited with call me to repair
or attempt to restore crashed hard drives. My purpose in writing this
particular newsletter is to help you avoid this from happening. Just a
s in a car, there are a few minor tasks that are required on a routine
basis . If you are working with a personal computer and not routinely
performing this maintenance you are surely headed for disaster.
As you work with a PC you are adding and deleting files. As you
do this, your hard drive writes this data to the spaces that are available.
What this means is that if a file you save is 25,000 bytes and the
space the file is attempting to save the file to is only 12,500 bytes,
the file will be split in half. Half of the file is written to another
space on the drive. Initially the PC has no problem reading the file that
is located in more than one location on the hard drive. The "FAT" or
File Allocation Table can understand and find the file that has been
"fragmented". After a period of time, depending on how much adding and
erasing of files is done on the particular PC, the fragmentation becomes
a serious problem. The data can become so fragmented that the head of
the hard drive can no longer locate the complete file and the hard drive
"crashes". The other problem is the wear and tear that occurs when
the head is constantly searching for fragmented data. One thing that
is certain is that if you are using a PC and not performing routine
defragmentation, you are surely headed for a problem.
The good news is the cure and prevention of this is easy. If you
are using DOS, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, "defragging", as it is call
d by techies, is easily performed. There are utility tools embedded in
the operating systems that perform these tasks. Of course there are
stand alone utilities like PCTools or Norton Utilities that do the job
a little better. But the embedded utilities will prevent these problems
One thing to make extra sure of is to be careful that there are no
"Ram Resident" programs loaded when you do a defrag. These are things
like mouse drivers or "hot keys" of some kind. If these remain loaded
when a defrag is performed the PC will not perform correctly after.
Make sure to unload these programs first.
After a crash, a call to the technician or a drive to the store
can repair or replace the hardware, but years of stored data is another
story. When you buy a new hard drive it is empty of data. The data
that was written to a crashed PC is no longer available to you unless
of course you recently backed up. Backing up on a regular basis will
make it able for you to restore all the data from the old system, and
easily put it on a new one. For those of you that have experienced
dataloss, you will surely endorse the statements I am making. For
those of you that have never had the sickening feeling that occurrs
during a crash, be forwarned it is a truly awful experience trying to
remember hundreds or thousands of names and numbers of past clients.
Backing up is a routine task that will save you when you need it most. There are tape drives and other types of drives that make the backup process extremely easy. If you don't care to spend the extra money for another piece of hardware, you can always backup on to floppy disks. Disks of course are a long and cumbersome way to back up, but just as effective in the event of a crash.
My advice to you and all my consulting clients, is to do a full backup
once a week, and what is called a incremental backup every day. The
incremental will only back up the files that have been changed since
the previous backup.. This is a good way to save time and still backup
all of your data.
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