Emergency Issues You May Face

 

  1. You WILL need to do a rebuild! Period. In the case of a hard disk failure, your data (pictures, movies and documents) are just simply gone,
  2. You WILL need to re-activate your copy of Windows. Although this could be painless, there are caveats that may prevent you from re-activating Windows. With a rebuild you have 3 days to do this,
  3. If you have been diligent and followed my guideline in my PC Maintenance Section, then all you need to do is to recover all your data from backup,
  4. Now you have your system up and running, you’ve got your data. Now you have to re-install all of your applications. This can be a daunting task,
  5. Continuing along, you’ve got everything installed, data recovered and your happy. OOPS - now you need to download and install ALL of your Operating System Service Packs, Hot fixes and patches. Generally speaking, there are about 85 to 120 of these for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7,
  6. Overall time (if you do nothing else), is about 2 days.

 

ThePCdoctor Emergency Solutions

 

  1. Purchase my PC Disaster recovery Service. What does this do and how does it work?
  2. I come to your home/office with my laptop and some magical DVDs,
  3. I take an Entire Snapshot (this is a true image of a sector by sector copy of your hard disk). I do recommend that data such as Video Files and Music be burnt onto DVD prior to imaging (this makes the image smaller and lowers the recovery time). However, my imaging process does not really care about the type of data - remember it’s a Sector by Sector snapshot, so I store RAW binary data,
  4. This snapshot is then stored on one of my servers. My severs house 4 * 1 Terabyte hard disks that are mirrored (basically, if one drive fails, the system still has a running disk). If you don’t want me to have a copy, we can burn them onto DVD. This presents no problem at all, I can still recover from DVD. See below for more information,
  5. In the event of a Catastrophe, I come back to your PC’s location, insert my Magical DVDs and from across the InterWeb, I can recover your image onto a new hard disk (even if it’s a brand new system),. Total download time is approximately 30 to 45 minutes,
  6. We then install any new drives that are required (they come with new systems). Total time: about 20 to 30 minutes,
  7. We boot your system for one final time (after any required drivers are installed), test it and I leave.

 

VIOLA, your are up and running in about 1 to 1.5 hours.

 

How much does all this magic cost?

 

1) Initial Snapshot: $75.00,

2) Recovery: $25.00 for each event,

3) if You want DVD copies of your image (for security or peace of mind reasons), I charge $5.00/DVD. You may also ask that I not store a copy on my server - no problem at all.

 

What do you do when your PC crashes? It’s typical that mechanical devices such as hard drives break and crash. Motherboards can fry (shorts, power supply issues), CPU can over heat and die, and more.

 

In the event of a Hard disk crash or a motherboard failure, we have to replace them. That’s pretty straight forward. On the other hand, when a CPU fries, it’s not so cut and dried. Your motherboard may be too old to get a new one and the same thing holds true for memory.

Disaster Recovery for the PC: Best Practices and Procedures