Have you backed up your PC recently?

Lost everything today. All my trading notes. All my accounts.

Fortunately, I backed up my work files 2-3 weeks ago. Phew.

mmm, well how did it happen, I mean did your hard drive die or something ? What about those digital vaults they any good.... ?

Removed some old programs, defragged, rebooted. It refused to come back. Couldn't even just replace system files.

Fortunately, I have a backup PC so was up and able to check my trades in under 5 minutes. Still, spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reinstalling programs and updates. It was something I had planned for, though, in accordance with my trading plan. So, not too much of a hassle, just more a waste of time.

It can happen at any time so be prepared.

On the upside, my PC runs really quickly!

glad to hear its ok for you. I have backed up software on disks, but was thinking about uploading to bt's digital vault, 20 gigs I think Ive got, dunno how safe it is though..... seems to be how things are going though cyber storage ? photos, music, files, software backups and the such...

I bought a cheap external hard disk. Not very quick (probably quicker than uploading to a remote site) but relatively inexpensive (£80?). If you can, store the unit in a different location.

Get a copy of Acronis Trueimage Shadow.

Back up your C drive image now (and save it on a DVD or two).

Then make incremental backups every week.

In a couple of months you can restore the original image (so you get full speed) and then just use the incrementals to get back the changes in your word/mail/excel etc documents.

I reimage my disk every month. Takes 15 mins for Acronis to do that and then 20 mins to recover changed stuff. My PC runs faster than it ever did since I started doing this.

I have 2 4gb usb drives, an SD card for important quick details plus 2 old laptop hard drives and a usb connector (one for music, the other for all else) and back it all up twice a week now. Too many times I've come close to losing all my music and that would make me cry! The only thing on my laptop is music, metatrader and internet access, the rest is backed up, twice!

Well done Shadow on two fronts - one for being prepared for such an event and the other for posting your experience which, hopefully, will prompt those traders who haven't made any provision for loss of data to do something about it. I have a cheap external hard drive and use a good bit of free software to automatically back up once a day . . .
cobian.se
Seems to work well.
Tim.