Anybody who uses a computer, whether at home or the office, knows how disruptive a full system crash can be. Even if you’ve never experienced it personally, the internet is full of complaints about lost time, irretrievable personal documents, pictures, homework, contacts, etc. Even if you’ve backed up everything, the hassle of recovering from a crash is legendary. Hardware must be checked, perhaps replaced or upgraded; software must be re-installed; personal documents must be migrated to the new system. At worst it is completely disastrous, and at best it is still an enormous headache.
These days, much of the disaster is avoidable. Most people know the value of implementing a regular back-up strategy. There are myriad solutions to modern data security, from a home or small-business server to backing up data in the cloud. Many work-related programs, such as Microsoft Word 2013, will automatically save your work at regular intervals in case of a crash. In addition, if you’ve visited this blog before, you are aware of the important role effective word recovery or excel repair software can play in safeguarding your data.
But there are other, smaller headaches that accompany a major crash. Once you’ve repaired or recovered your important files, you have an equally important task ahead of you. You have to personalize your computer environment. This may seem trivial, but it is one of the most frustrating aspects of being forced into a new start. Long gone are the days when a computer was meant for computation alone. The personal computer, whether used at home or at the office, has evolved into something more like an assistant – a companion who just happens to compute. The so-called “personal” computer has become truly personal. We choose its color schemes, the shape and presentation of its dialogue boxes, its sounds, how it reacts to certain sequences, and many other aspects of our interaction with it. Many of these choices are meant to reflect our personality, but many others are meant to streamline our work. In Word 2013, for instance, it is possible to change default settings like margins, fonts, font sizes, and more. When this is done, any new document is arranged by default to your specifications. This is useful if you frequently need to produce the same sort of document, or if your company enforces certain style requirements in its communications. The default information is stored in a file called Normal.dotm.
In the event of a crash, you can use Word Repair to recover as much data as possible, which can be a life saver. But if the Normal.dotm file is damaged, you will still have to spend valuable time setting up your system – time you already spent once before. In order to minimize the time between a serious crash and getting back to work, consider backing up your Normal.dotm on a thumb drive or wherever you back up the rest of your data. If something goes wrong and you are forced to repair your documents and re-install Word, you can simply replace the new file with the one you saved before the crash.
DataNumen, Inc., the worldwide leader in data recovery, provides an efficient, effective SQL recovery solution along with data repair software for other leading programs that include Word, Excel, and more.