It happened two weeks ago, that dreaded moment when you realize your PC hard drive is dead and you don't have much choice but start all over.

Of course it happened during one of my worst work weeks ever.

SURVEY:Tell us how ready you are
1. I do regular backups
2. I don't do any backup
3. Some backup but not everything
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What happens next? You always hope you've done a good job of backing up your data files, your family photos, your music, your key work documents.

In my case, I had been using an online service called Carbonite. I first began using Carbonite to back up a home PC. Then I opted to use a second Carbonite subscription (at $49 per year) to back up my office machine.

So the moment came when I had to put Carbonite to the test. Would it do a restore so that I would have every one of my byzantine system settings and personal preferences the same as before?

As an aside, I need mention our company IT people routinely, constantly nag us to do a backup of our files, using optical media and saving them somewhere for later restoration. I never follow that advice. It isn't that hard; I simply don't have the patience to keep popping in CDs (we don't give people like me burnable DVD drives) into the machine.

That means I prefer something basic, which is why I chose an online backup tool. An online option may not be for everyone but in my case, Carbonite does the job perfectly. It's worth the $49 for the peace of mind.

Following its fairly simple restore wizard, I ended up choosing not a complete restore, but a selective restore, opting only to bring back all my key documents and personal data files.

That choice involved about 4,600 files.

Carbonite works best on a nice broadband connection; imagine restoring 4,600 files (some fairly large) without broadband.

In any event, it took about six hours for the restoration.

But here's the other part of the story; not every valuable file had been backed up by Carbonite. That was my own fault; I had chosen not to back up my entire system, figuring it made no sense to save every doc in every possible location.

So naturally, some of the files I couldn't find weren't backed up in the first place, from my own doing.

From this point on, I back up just about everything with Carbonite.

So that left me with second need: how to get the remaining missing files -- mostly photos and assorted other documents -- back from the dead hard drive.

Fortunately, our IT person, Alvin Pitmon, went out and bought a copy of SpinRite, a disk recovery tool developed by Web security expert Steve Gibson. It's available at his site, GRC.com.

SpinRite loads a minimal DOS-level access to a barely functioning drive. Once loaded, it allows you to view and copy files off that "lost" disk.

Pitmon copied over all my remaining files -- another 740 or so that I'm glad I got back.

SpinRite doesn't solve every disk failure. My colleague Isamu Jordan had a hard drive failure at his work computer roughly the same week I did.

First, Som didn't have a backup of his drive; all his key documents and saved favorites were gone.

Second, SpinRite didn't save his data. When a drive really fails, there's not much anyone can do. (Som is The SR music writer; he keeps all his music and other good stuff on an external drive, which was not affected. Even so, an external hard drive will fail at some point; I hope he prepares for that day.)

I'll make sure Som knows about Carbonite or any of the other affordable backup options one has, like Box.net.

Am I concerned about backing up data online, out of a security concern? Not really. My office documents don't contain any financial or personal information.

Even though I back up my main home PC with Carbonite, all the key data files that involve banking and finance are encrypted and are backed up in encrypted form. So that doesn't pose an issue for me as well.