Chapter 1: PC Disasters and Recovery Overview

Overview

A disaster, like beauty, is often defined by the beholder.

While you might claim that losing an e-mail letter you’re writing to a friend or colleague is a disaster, others might reserve the term “disaster” for losing all their financial information stored in a product such as Intuit’s Quicken. On the other hand, I define a disaster as anything I can’t resolve quickly and effectively given my years of experience.

Even most dictionaries give widely varying definitions for the term “disaster,” ranging from “an unfortunate event” to “a catastrophic situation with widespread negative ramifications.” Most of us, however, call just about any major PC inconvenience a disaster.

None of us likes to think about it, but disasters can happen anytime, anywhere.

Like it or not, the most common cause of a PC disaster is users—the way they use and abuse their systems. If users are struggling to find time to get all of their work done, they often don’t feel they have enough time to learn enough about their systems to make them work faster and more effectively. PC users improperly connect, misconfigure, and misuse their systems all the time.

But even if they use their PCs correctly, users can still face hardware and software malfunctions due to badly written programs and drivers (special software for communicating with hardware), poorly tested hardware, and instability that can arise in Windows itself. And that’s not all. Fire, flood, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, lightning, horrific accidents, and today, even acts of terrorism may strike at any time, with or without advance notice, mindless of whether or not a user is prepared and whether or not there’s a deadline for work, school, or a community project. They can disrupt and even obliterate the ways in which users work, create, and live.

But disasters aren’t limited to the type of eye-catching, headline-producing event you see on the evening news. A sudden summer thunderstorm—or power surges, blackouts, and brownouts created by too much demand on the power grid during a summer heat wave—can total any unprotected electronics device, such as a computer.

You can’t make disasters stop happening. What you can affect is how easily you can get your life back in order after the fact. The focus of this book is how to recover your functional PC operation and data after various types of disasters.

Let’s get going!