AVOIDING PROBLEMS

It’s often said that a clever person solves a problem, but a wise person avoids it. So it is with repairing computers. It’s all very satisfying fixing things, but it would be better if they didn’t break in the first place. That’s slightly unrealistic thinking, but if you have up-to-date backups of your important data, then it will take the pressure off if the worst happens.

We did a backup special a while back (see LXF267) and discovered that it’s easy to set Déjà Dup up once and then have it perform automated backups.

For less regimented backups, for example the overdue manuscripts you’ve been working on this week, saving to any kind of cloud storage service (or better still, your own Nextcloud instance) will give you ample redundancy.

Lots of the problems described in this feature come about as a result of Windows (allegedly). And we’ve always advised keeping it on its own disk if you’re dual-booting. But perhaps we should go further, and say that prior to booting Windows you should unplug your Linux drive(s). We’ve been around long enough to have been bitten by inexplicable failures, and we regret not unclipping that SATA cable every time.

If something goes wrong with your Windows bootloader then it’s really not a good idea to try and fix it in Linux. The Windows recovery environment has its own BootRec.exe tool for reinstalling its bootloader and configuration data (BCD), but we won’t talk about it here. It certainly won’t help you repair your Linux install.