I just lost about 5 years of data (professional and personal) after the death of a hard drive. No, I had not backed it up. Yes, that was incredibly stupid. The dead drive was sent to the best data recovery firm in the business, used by the Pentagon, forensics teams... Yesterday, they informed me that the crash was such that nothing whatsoever was recoverable. This is devastating. I had always heard that, even in the event of fires, they'd be able to recover some, if not all, of your files.

I am a freelance designer and writer and all my creative energy was poured into that receptacle. Next week I'll begin calling my clients to tell them about some of the losses. I am working hard on trying not to blame anyone but myself and fate. My husband traditionally does all things related to computer maintenance, so he is an easy target for blame here, but this would be dangerous emotional territory to cross.

Please don't wait. Make copies of your stuff TODAY, even if it takes some time. Don't assume it will be recoverable or that your partner "probably has it covered".

Thanks for reading. Venting helps.

Ada,

Sorry to hear, but also astonished that this firm couldn't recover anything. Sounds fishy, even. Normally an entire disk does not go bad all at once, if it's even a media issue. If they send the disk back I'd start looking around for a computer science student who wants to give it a crack.

Thanks, Thomas. Not a bad idea about finding a C.S. student... nothing to lose at this point.

The man at DriveSavers, where we sent it, said (a bit coldly for my taste, as I was quietly blubbering/barely suppressing sobs at the time), "The kind of crash you had? With the clicking noise? Each one of those clicks was your data dying... Your data is basically... DUST. These crashes are more common than people think. Nothing that can be done."

Yowch.

Sorry, but I'm calling BS on DS here. They have a pretty web page, but I don't believe the clicking bit. The clicking is not your platters disintegrating, but rather your the drive heads. The platters are - generally speaking - durable, and in the worst case scenario can be transferred to a new drive casing and data extracted. That however requires a "clean room", among other tech specialties.

If they haven't sent it back already, I'd demand they return it ASAP.

Generally speaking, your average alpha geek will probably freeze it for an hour or so, then plug it in to his (or her) computer as a slave drive (not the boot drive) to see whether it spins up. If it spins and is recognized, he (or she) will pull data off as quickly as possible. If the freezer trick doesn't do it, you can tilt the drive (vertical) to see if that does the trick.

Good luck with this. It's painful to deal with, but I doubt all is lost.

Can't offer any tech suggestion but am very sorry to hear, and hoping you were told wrong and there will be a solution.

Wow. I'm with Thomas on this one. It sounds very fishy to me too. :-/

Funny you should mention the freezer trick, Thomas. We read about that one at some geek site and tried it, but no luck. We didn't try the tilt technique, though. I do appreciate your comments as I had given up completely... Maybe there's a small chance that stuff will be recovered by other means. I'll keep ye posted!

So what is the cheapest way to do this and how often? The most valuable things on my computer are photos and the programs themselves. I save most things on my desktop.

Try GeekSquad. They are at Circuit City and other electronic stores. They are usually young lads who are computer geeks. It is a service, though.

We have an external back up disk; it makes an incremental back up each night (you can specify the frequency yourself). Easy does it. A couple of hundred euros.

AdaVeen, so sorry to hear about this serious problem. I hope Thomas' suggestions will turn things around. They sound definitely worth a try.

I have an external hard drive and Norton Ghost, which backs up my computer and work daily.

Good luck.

In my experience, it's better to save copies of the individual files/projects in an easily reachable format.

Yeah, it's great to have every single thing on your hard drive backed up, but when our computers have died thoroughly enough to require the purchase of a new computer, we've wound up upgrading, in which case most of the 'complete backup' is totally useless.

For example, I keep our internet bookmarks saved to a disk. When our computer died, once we'd gotten the new one set up with software, etc., all I had to do was import that file, and we had bookmarks that were as current as that file. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

I have a hard drive that I use to back up important files and I back those up by putting them on a separate disc. If the internal drive of the computer can die, so can an external drive. If it's important, I save it in at least two formats.

True. But it seems highly unlikely that they would die in unison.

The big thing is to back up documents. The OS and programs can be (and should be) re-loaded, should it prove necessary to move to a new disk. In a perfect world you'd have a binder with your windows disk, and your device drivers, and your productivity apps, all on their original disks, with product keys.

That then leaves your documents. For the most part, the critical ones are on a flash drive, with a backup to the main drive, and archive to a external USB drive. They can be had for $100-$150, and for sporadic use, you can even go refurbished to save some $$$

AdaVeen, did you format a new drive and try to slave the trouble drive in? It saved me a lot of trouble with a badly-infected drive. That way there's less stress on it.

Yikes.

I haven't tried that, no, Tomás.

Some good ideas here for future reference, though some won't work for Macs. Hubby just purchased a RAID drive for back-up. Kind of pricey, but it will store two copies of all and there is an automated system that can be used... now i'm working on finding off-site storage in case the unthinkable happens (fire! flood!). Of course, taking these steps means that nothing bad will ever happen again, thanks to murphy's law... ; )

thanks five-o.

This is a Mac, eh? I'm considering buying one for my next laptop. Any idea what caused the crash? (My sympathies, BTW.)

Probably nothing that she did (unless she failed to tell us about the time she threw the system against the wall? - kidding) ..."parts is parts", and sometimes drives fail. I replace plenty of them at work every month, and most often am asked "what did I DO?" - like any other piece of machinery, sometime down the road it will fail. Some sooner than we'd like, and sometimes w/o any "hints" that it will. I get some from the warrantee replacement co. that fail right out of the box.

Agree also, with Thomas that it sounds fishy that it *cannot* be recovered at ALL. Sounds like a lack of desire to make maximum effort. Wishing you luck in an alternate shop!

Ada I'm so sorry you have lost so much of your data.

We have lost information before and had to learn the hard way. We bought a back external hard drive. We have 3 computers in our house, and some of those computers have valuable information on them, ie my father has YEARS of family history dating back to the 1500s. So all important info is on that hard drive, however, we were advised even back up hard drives can fail, and that the simple CD is also a very essential tool to do backups on.

I still hope somehow you are able to get the information back.

Agree; it's rarely a user error that causes a crash like that.

I've done a little research lately, though, and it looks like Apple hard drives are a bit notorious. Bummer.

The CD will eventually become obsolete and before that happens, it is critical to transfer the contents to the form that replaces it. Right now, that's a DVD, but that will also become obsolete in time. If someone had important data on a 5-inch floppy (remember those, they probably are out of luck.)

I hate to chime in with this, but the durability of CD-R and DVD-R is rather suspect. Apparently the dyes on the write-side tend to break down over time. How long depends on the disc itself and (to an extent) the storage conditions. Long story short - my records are on two hard disks. When one goes belly-up (or three years), I replace and archive the old drive before things head south.

That's the same principle. Save and re-save.

Just goes to show that technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. We still have documents from hundreds of years ago written on paper. Print everything out and you'll have no worries.

What I was thinking too. Maybe there's something to be said for parchment and iron gall ink after all...

Hmmm...I don't know about that. The Gospel of Judas hasn't fared so well. Neither has my checkbook register after the dog got to it and shredded it. Talk about wishing I had a backup!!!

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to see and touch some handwritten documents on parchment from the 11th century a few years ago - they were still in very good condition. The stuff printed on paper in the 19th century was disintegrating.

Hey, haven't checked in on this thread in a while... Sorry about your check book register, Thomas. That dirty dog.

Twitch -- I can't blame Macs in this case. This was a third party, external hard drive. I am shamefully ignorant of how these things work, but Drive Savers said that the "main platters" were permanently damaged on the drive, "the worst kind of failure."

I love Macs and highly recommend them, especially for "creative" types (read: non-computer savvy people). The biggest troubles I have with them are usually the result of operator error.

The good news is that I've moved on -- emotionally, at least. Also, the fact that I leave my "trash" full of stuff has served me well: many early iterations of recent projects were stored in there. We also performed a recovery of items emptied from the trash and found a few more files. yea!

This makes me think of those crazy Irish monks laboriously creating the Book of Kells in the 8th & 9th centuries — stunning illuminated manuscripts. They're still around.