How many times have you been told to back up your hard drive, your photos, your mp3s and other important documents? I spend enough time online each day that I should know better, but noooooo. Do I heed this advice? Of course not. Why? Because it would never happen to me. Until about six months ago.
A few years ago I added a 120GB hard drive to my desktop computer as a 'slave' drive. Meaning there was no operating system on it - all of the files on it were from My Documents. Hey, I wasn't keeping my information on the same hard drive as my operating system so I must be in good shape.
Well on back in July I went to save something to this drive by I couldn't find it in My Computer - I got a bit nervous thinking the worst. Well after a bit of troubleshooting I realized that there was something wrong with the drive. Now mind you this drive had about 100GB of information on it and most of it wasn't backed up. I had a sick feeling in my stomach for weeks.
What was on this drive? All of my digital photos from 1997 through June of 2006. My mp3's, about 40GB worth. All of the documents I use on a daily basis including a golf outing I run for a scholarship in my sister's name at a local university ... and the golf outing was in the beginning of August. Oh, and I just started a new job in New York City after 10 years at my old job ... so add that on top of all things going through my head. What annoyed me the most was the fact I have several hard drives in external cases that I could have used to back up my data.
So for several days I tried to retreive the files myself, but had little luck. I was able to grab some - but not everything. It was disheartening as I knew it was expensive to have a professional company retreive my data - upwards of $3,000. So I contacted a friend who knew someone that did hard drive recovery as a hobby, I figured he would be able to do it and I would pay him a few hundred bucks instead.
I have an iPod, it was free so I will take it - what sucks about it is that it's easy to get files on to it, not so easy to retreive music off of it. I bought shareware that let me do this, so I was able to care less about the music on the drive and more about the photos.
I made a trip out to the college where he works, dropped of the hard drive and he said he would contact me in a few days after he was inspected the drive. We speak and he says he can access the drive, but after retreiving about 5 photos the hard drive would crash. Again and again. It was then I knew I had to go to a professional. I came across this YouTube Video and then sent out email inquiries to both companies.
I decided to go with Kroll Ontrack since their email had more detailed information about the process and cost. And after analyzing the hard drive would give me a firm price for recovery as well as a list of the contents on the drive and what is recoverable and what isn't.
About a week goes by and I get a phone call from the rep at OnTrack and the message he leaves doesn't sound very good. We finally speak and he says that he is only able to recover 54% of the hard drive. I felt sick. He emailed me the results that I was able to go through the test file. Even though they were only able to recover 54% of the drive, they were able to recover 89% of the contents. Meaning 11% of the content on the site was responsible for 46% of the hard drive space. There were close to 22,000 items on the drive and they recovered just about 20,000 of them. Cost: $1,600 ... getting my files back Priceless.
Now I am in the process of trying to find software and a technique to back up all of the computers in the house. I came across this great video on C|Net which explains that Windows comes with a free back up utility but what they don't tell you is it does not come installed with your computer, it's on the XP disc and you have to install it manually. Which sucks considering Dell no longer provides you with the XP install disc and finding it online took a bit of work. Here is a link to WinXPTutor's instructions and file download so you can start using the back up utility.
Tell me, do you back up your data? If yes, what method of backing up are you using.
No porn was injured during this event as JSKills says ... "Porn is like water coming through a faucet. No need to save it."
