Had a client's PC die mid-update and learned a hard lesson about backups

I was at a house in Austin last Tuesday fixing a slow Windows update, and the power flickered right as it was writing the system files. The machine bricked completely, and the guy had 4 years of family photos with no backup anywhere. I spent 3 hours pulling the drive and recovering what I could with a SATA dock, but we lost about 6 months of stuff. Has anyone else had a power outage ruin a simple update job like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_nina21d ago

Did you have any luck getting the guy to actually set up a backup system after you recovered what you could? I always wonder if people learn from these close calls or just go back to their old ways.

morganhill21d ago

Yeah that's usually how it goes unfortunately.

the_hayden21d ago

My buddy Mark had the exact same thing happen during a thunderstorm in Houston last year. His PC died right in the middle of a BIOS update and it was completely toast. He lost all his wedding photos from the previous summer and had to pay a data recovery place 400 bucks to get most of it back, but some stuff was gone for good. @the_nina, Mark is one of those guys who swore he'd set up backups after that, but last I checked he still hasn't done a thing about it.