A VERY Painful Lesson Learned

Throughout my time here at Wealthy Affiliate, I've seen lots of posts here about the importance of backing up things in case something goes wrong. Now I do have a couple of external hard drives as well as USB sticks and once in a great while I will backup things from my main desktop, but not very frequently.

I now have found out the hard way of why I should back stuff as often as I can, because last week, my main desktop PC started updating the latest update from Windows 10 and that's when the computer apocalypse struck my PC. After an attempted and automatic restart from the update, there was nothing but a black screen. I manually shut down my PC and turned it back on and nothing but black screens still (I have 2 screens connected to my desktop). I then researched on my phone that after manually shutting off and turning on the computer three times, the PC will automatically boot up in a repair process where I can choose different options of how I want to proceed.

I tried fixing the boot up process, that failed. I tried system restore from an earlier restore point, that failed. I tried removing the latest updates from Windows 10, that failed. Last, but not least, I tried reinstalling Windows 10 and keeping my personal files and that failed. I was in near tears at that point because I had some VERY important files that I thought were gone forever.

Fortunately, I did some research and found out how to create a bootable drive from a USB drive and download a program onto it to recover files from a crashed or unbootable PC. THANKFULLY, that worked and I have been able to recover some of the important files from that PC which includes things needed for my business here at Wealthy Affiliate. I'm typing this post from my laptop and making sure to back up everything from it often. Lesson learned.