A friendly reminder....

[RachelMarie]

Today, I grab my backup external Hard Drive and head to a friends house. It hasn't been working on my computer and because I thought it was an issue with my computer, I took it to his house to make sure I was correct.

This Hard drive is what I store ALL of my pictures on. The Birth of my child, family outings, Fun moments. Everything. I have back ups of this hard drive until 2008. Well, needless to say, the hard drive is a goner. I lost everything on it. Holiday pictures, Important files....everything.

I'm telling myself to breathe. Doesn't make it easier. I have a friend who is going to do his best to recover anything/everything he can but he also can't make any promises. So....as of right now, I lost a few years of my child's life in photographs but learned one hell of a good lesson....

FOLKS...Back up your back ups. Back up your back ups back ups. I'm sure this is all common knowledge to you all. It was to me too. And for the last year I kept saying I would get around to it, but somehow never found the time to do so. DO IT NOW. I'm serious. Log off here, save your information.

I'm a jacka@#.
Have a wonderful night.

 

[DarkRose]

I had this happen to me a few months ago, my external backup HDD came up physially corrupted... Lost a ton of stuff also, have bits and pieces of it backup up elsewhere, but not all of it.
Pics, movies, music, documents, etc...

Hope you get some of your stuff recovered, mine won't even initialize

 

[Libertarian01]

Rachel,

I have had this happen once myself.

If it is EXTREMELY critical there are companies that can rip apart your hard drive and save most everything on there. It is NOT cheap, but it also isn't beyond reach.

If I recall correctly it will run between $450 and $800. Like I said, not cheap but if it is truly important to you consider saving up.

I am truly sorry to hear about this! My dead hard drive has some of the last pictures of my grandmother on it and I haven't had the resources to get it taken care of. My grandmother has been dead now for several years. I don't have many pictures of her on there but I would guess about 20, give or take.

You are correct to back up the backups! The nice thing today is that memory is reasonably cheap but all too often we don't prioritize such things until it is too late!

Best of Luck,

Doug

 

[indyjoe]

If you have data you cannot lose:

1 - Have it at least in 3 different medias and 2 different physical locations
2 - Religiously replace all hard drives every 18-24 months. Period.
3 - Use a good cloud based backup service. (I pay $100 to SpiderOak every year for 100 GB of versioned online backup. This is over any number of computers I use and they have a Linux client.)

If it will not spin up, you an try freezing it in a ziplock bag and occasionally it will come back. Immediately copy everything off it. If you can't get it to go, data recovery is your only answer. $500-10k in price. $100 a year is much cheaper than that.

 

[360]

I might suggest one of the online file servers too. There are reputable ones. You can access the data from anywhere too.

 

[pudly]

If the hard drive spins but won't read, then I'd seriously suggest SpinRite. Amazing program for hard drive maintenance and recovery. If it just spins and clicks, then it is truly a goner and you will need to go the expensive route for recovery.

Good luck.

 

[Benny]

Rachel,

I have had this happen once myself.

If it is EXTREMELY critical there are companies that can rip apart your hard drive and save most everything on there. It is NOT cheap, but it also isn't beyond reach.

If I recall correctly it will run between $450 and $800. Like I said, not cheap but if it is truly important to you consider saving up.

I am truly sorry to hear about this! My dead hard drive has some of the last pictures of my grandmother on it and I haven't had the resources to get it taken care of. My grandmother has been dead now for several years. I don't have many pictures of her on there but I would guess about 20, give or take.

You are correct to back up the backups! The nice thing today is that memory is reasonably cheap but all too often we don't prioritize such things until it is too late!

Best of Luck,

Doug

All of this.

Also, buy the external HDs that have separate components in them...A lot of times the USB controller(plus other things) will go out and you can just replace that, instead of having to send your HD to a company that will charge you $600+ to recover the data.

 

[Integraholic]

I had a hard drive that would spin but I couldn't access anything on it. One day I installed windows 7 and amazingly it gave me access. I don't know if it would work for you, but it may be worth a shot to find a friend with Win 7. Unless you already run it, then my input is worthless. Good luck.

 

[Sausagecake]

Two different 8 gig flash drives

But thanks for the reminder as I have been failing lately

 

[SavageEagle]

I so feel your pain on this. I have 2 hard drives sitting here dead with about 6 years of pictures and videos. There is hope though. There are places out there that will extract the info, for a cost.

 

[Benny]

Does anyone know the cheapest place for data retrieval out there(the kind where they have to remove the HD and pull the info off)?

 

[UncleMike]

It might sound like overkill but I have nine hard drives attached to my desktop.
Four internal and five external.
I make multiple redundant backups of everything plus all of my photos are burned onto DVD's.
Last June my Systemax Ultra desktop fried a capacitor and the MoBo went south.
I simply bought a new Ultra from my local distributer, installed the drives from the old unit, hooked up the external drives, printers, and LAN router, and was up and running in no time.
Even if the Primary drive had been lost on the old unit I would have had multiple backups on the other drives to reload all of my programs and data.
Also the new unit came with Windows 7 Professional.
I've had every Windows Operating System since Windows 3.0, and Win 7 is by far the best operating system they've ever made. It's easier to work with than XP, and doesn't have the bloat, or the RAM hogging characteristics, of Vista.
In short, it's what Vista should have been.

 

[SavageEagle]

You really like 7 over XP?

 

[rmabrey]

If its not completely dead you can download knoppix linux (or most any linux) and run it live from the cd and you can more than likely access the hard drive.

 

[UncleMike]

You really like 7 over XP?

Yes sir!
I've loaded Win 7 Professional on all three of my computers.
Win 7 can operate in Compatibility mode for XP and Vista with nothing more than a click in the Properties box to tell it to search and apply the proper settings. It'll run programs and FPS games that wouldn't run in Vista. Also if you want to download a free app from Microsoft you can run XP in virtual mode on a separate drive or a partition on the C drive.
I haven't had a single issue with Win 7 yet on any computer.
Yet.
Forget all of the horror stories about Vista. Win 7 has inherited none of the problems that Vista had.

 

[SavageEagle]

So you can play Halo 2 on 7??? I might have to consider it once the service pack comes out.

 

[DarkRose]

I've had every Windows Operating System since Windows 3.0, and Win 7 is by far the best operating system they've ever made. It's easier to work with than XP, and doesn't have the bloat, or the RAM hogging characteristics, of Vista.
In short, it's what Vista should have been.

It is indeed the best OS they've made yet. I'm also diggin the beta of IE 9, much quicker, less excess space used by menu bars, just a little getting used to for new positions of favorites and such...

Still got my External HDD (it's a Seagate FreeAgent) hoping maybe someday I can get it working again...

 

[Clay]

Does anyone use one of the online backup places like Carbonite.com??

Ive often thought about using something like that for pictures.

 

[ATOMonkey]

My OS was recently corrupted, (and then magically uncorrupted itself ), we paid the local computer guy $60 to backup the HD onto a 2 TB external drive.

I should probably buy another external 2 TB HD to mirror the first one.

I also just finished burning all the pics and vids of our kiddos to DVD.

I tried to get the wife to do it, but she just looks at pictures for hours on end and doesn't get anything backed up.

 

[UncleMike]

So you can play Halo 2 on 7??? I might have to consider it once the service pack comes out.

I have Halo 2 but I haven't loaded it yet. Since Microsoft has a big stake in the Halo franchise I don't see any problems playing it on Win 7.