I've been using computers for a long time... the first one being one my dad had on loan from work in the early 90s to do timecards for the people he was responsible for.
The Ancient IBM PS2-Z50 (or something like that...) was a 286 with a strange bus (according to the repair guy) a whopping 2mb of ram, and a 40mb hard disk. I probably still have school reports getting bitrot on floppy disks... However something went wrong with it, and the repair guy accidentally broke one of the main board interconnection areas on it, leading to it being gone for several weeks.
Later my parents got me a brand new IBM PS1-... something, which had a Pentium-166 (No MMX) cpu, 66mhz FSB, 60ns EDO 72pin Sims, and started out from the factory with 32mb of ram, upgraded at purchase to 64mb, much later upgraded to 128mb.
That's where I learned, quite the hard way, that windows, in any flavour, LOVES to be re-installed every 6-12 months for best performance. I'd do it every 3 or so after the first hard drive upgrade.
However, the very first time I had to do it I had all of my files backed up as a multi-disk (aprox 50-60) .zip archive... since I didn't really have anything else useful to back up on to...
Only it failed Horribly somewhere early on because one of the disks had gone bad. So not only did it take hours (storing), I also lost pretty much all my data.
The next item for upgrade, after much pleading, was a super speedy (I think maybe 6 or 8x) Ricoh CD burner. At Last I could backup my install disks, Realistically store my documents... and to this day, have a massive 15-20 CD collection of files stored with the proprietary backup software that came with the drive... Someday I might recover my files from that before they bitrot too far.
Over the years since then I've done many things with many, many more systems. Like having a laptop turned on, and set on the back of a couch, only to bump it accidentally and have it die badly (thankfully it was replaced). I too got burned with one of those cheep PSUs with bad capacitors, and since then I've looked at reviews and bought name brand units (Seasonic is my current favourite, though most of the respectable names from cooling solutions offer rebranded PSUs, usually subcontracted out to Seasonic or other nice PSU makers.).
More recently, I discovered that if you don't alter/access data on a modern consumer hard disk at least once every 3-4 years, it can silently go bad. Also, my parents computer had two things go wrong with it. CPU fried and the hard drive died. (Probably heat death/occasional bumps given it's placement.) Unfortunately they weren't so good about having some kind of backup layer in place... Like burning everything important to CD every so often. I must admit that I too am a little lazy like that and don't do it as often as I should. Though in my case I Did splurge for RAID 5 (Originally 4 x 250 for 750gb of usable storage... but my somewhat new super raid is 9x500 for up to 2tb), which protects me from more common hardware failures, if not user error.
This eventually leads to ads for a specific product, however the site does explain data-integrity and briefly touches on security related to it, in ways that are more easily understood by non-technical individuals.
tao of backupThe only two other pieces of information I have to offer in the area...
1) Backup systems, not just drives, are always nice.
2) Dilbert/Dogbert knew what they were talking about. When something fails, it's time to upgrade. (though honestly you should stay ahead of the failures...)
