[SOLVED] After a computer sudden crash, what diagnostics to run?

[Minaz]

If a computer crashes suddenly, what should/could you do to ensure that nothing was damaged/no data was lost?

a) In the case of BSOD, whereby the PC at least has had a chance to close some process
b) In the case of power loss with no UPS or freezing, where there was no warning

I am wondering how reliable Windows 10/11 has become in failsafe the hardware and data... and how to determine the extent if any of loss.

 

[Colif]

Backups. Its only way but then you can't have constant backups so there is always going to be some data loss - all that created since last backup. If you backup once a day (at night) you only lose what was created that day since last backup.

Another way is to run everything off the cloud so if you do crashs, its all online anyway. That is sort of how I do it as most of my documents are on Onedrive.

 

[Drew125]

I must agree with Colif. Backups backups and more backups, or store your files in onedrive. If your pc BSODs there is a chance it will be ok. Just resolve the driver conflict 9 times of 10. Sudden power loss "rarely" causes data loss due to NTFSs Log and backup structures. But.... it does happen from time to time. Sudden failure of hardware or fatal errors however only fix is backups. Id recommended Storage craft shadow protect. It can make an image of your drive nightly and backup it up to the cloud or a nas box. We did this all the time on my first job (2017). Only catch its not free software.

 

[Minaz]

I must agree with Colif. Backups backups and more backups, or store your files in onedrive. If your pc BSODs there is a chance it will be ok. Just resolve the driver conflict 9 times of 10. Sudden power loss "rarely" causes data loss due to NTFSs Log and backup structures. But.... it does happen from time to time. Sudden failure of hardware or fatal errors however only fix is backups. Id recommended Storage craft shadow protect. It can make an image of your drive nightly and backup it up to the cloud or a nas box. We did this all the time on my first job (2017). Only catch its not free software.

Thanks! Just to clarify, this software makes an image of your entire HDD at once in a compressed file? So if you do suffer a loss, you would get a similar or larger capacity drive and there would be reverse-imaging software that will expand the files back onto the new drive just as it was before and you can just swap the new one for the old?

 

[Drew125]

Thanks! Just to clarify, this software makes an image of your entire HDD at once in a compressed file? So if you do suffer a loss, you would get a similar or larger capacity drive and there would be reverse-imaging software that will expand the files back onto the new drive just as it was before and you can just swap the new one for the old?

Basically yes. The software has the ability to take a image of the drive. And write and image to a disk. The image is compressed and has the option to exclude free space. What that means is basically a 1 TB drive with around 300 GB used space, The image would be around 250 GB. Even though the volume is 1 TB only 300 GB is used, the rest is ignored. Once you take a full backup you can set it to take incrementals every night. An incremental backup is an image of the changes from the last backup to the current. I will say I have restored the images back to new disk, while possible its tricky.