So as of now I am spending a wonderful evening trying to recover from the spontaneous destruction of my system drive and a bunch of work documents and game installations with it [viva google for saving the relevant stuff].
After wrestling for hours with trying to partition the storage drive [mai animu iz saif! ha!], install Windows 7, fix around with bootmgr, get around clean install vs upgrade key, downloading firefox from IE (never gets old), and all the joys of reinstalling a whole load of programs, I've learned my lesson.
Fine, I'll spend the money. I'll back up things. I want to practice good data habits. It's not nearly as fun setting up new things when you don't get fast new hardware to go with the experience.
But where do I start?
I have a vague idea of picking up an external drive from a local hardware store and find programs and do all that. Usually I'd google for myself usually. But I want to hear someone's opinion of what I should do before I jump in and impulse buy three hard drives from Amazon for kicks. For example,
- Which is better and/or cheaper, an external HD or an internal HD + external closure?
- My current system and formerly just storage drive is 1.5 TB, but it's like 1/3 if not 1/4 full. Do I need an equivalent sized drive to backup? Can 1TB do? 2TB?
- I haven't yet jumped into checking out if my Steam games are okay -- I had the foresight to install them on the storage drive -- but in future cases of disasters, if/when I restore from backups, what do I do?
- Same idea goes for Windows itself. Will it complain, rant, rave, authenticate, and force me to rough through the registry if I restore a partition or even an entire drive from an image?
- Which programs are popular/do you like in backing up Windows stuff and lots of...media...files?
- What are your data habits?
- Why must Windows 8 exist to prevent me from finding an excuse to buy a new computer?
Thank you in advance.