Yep, happened to me over the weekend. Hard drive failure. Got cyclical redundancy errors on my working image drive that also stored a small part of my CD rips. All in all, I got everything that I needed. Most of it was backed up, but some of it had to be recovered the old fashioned way. I don’t know yet how much of my music is lost. Aside from about $100 worth of iTunes music purchases I could care less. I’ll re-rip the original if I miss it that much.
Lessons to take away:
- Back up early and often. Though I normally subscribe to this theory I have been a little lazy lately. I had a number of jobs that I was still working that I hadn’t gotten to a second hard drive or to a DVD. I got lucky. Every single job was found and recovered. My documents folder is on another disk that is backed up via software every day three times a day and I am religious about storing documents in only that folder.
- Back up again. My normal process has me copy files over to a second hard drive and then from there to burn a CD/DVD. I didn’t do it for about half of this drive. Either move to a second drive or burn a CD/DVD. Make it a part of your daily routine just like your shower, shave and shi…..you know what I mean.
- Don’t rely on yourself to do the backup, use software/hardware to do it for you.
Data recovery nightmare:
I tried all of the usual suspects and got nowhere. Every single one of my applications could see the file structure so I had hope that most if not all of the data could be recovered but none of my usual tools could copy over any of the data. For over three hours I attempted application after application and found myself helplessly lost. It was so bad I won’t mention any of the application names here as they are no longer worthy of any consideration IMHO.
My best friend who works in IT called to talk about another issue we are working together and asked me why I was being so pissy on fathers day. When I told him why he said relax, I’ll be there in an hour and we will have your data off tonight. I was skeptical, but he is the expert. He came over with his laptop and an external drive and we gave it a go. He plugged my LaCie in to his laptop and he got his great tool to see the file structure just like mine, but the difference was when he pointed the software to his external drive it started to copy things. A lot of things. Nearly everything as a matter of fact. After two hours (which we spent watching the NBA Finals) the deed was done.
I instantly went about the task of checking my image files. They were there and they were all fine. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that this hopeless situation had been solved. I asked what program he had used and expected to hear it was some $1,000 wonder, but he told me that he used a $100 application called File Scavenger that he has used for some time. He uses it for hard drives and CD/DVD recovery all the time. I looked last night and File Scavenger is only $49. I will be buying this for myself later today and I highly recommend that you do the same. I screwed around with this drive for 3 hours and couldn’t peel off a kilobyte of data to save my life. A little over 2 hours after my buddy got to my house I had a 250GB HD in my fat little fingers with every single file that I HAD TO HAVE on it. I slept like a rock last night after spending the better part of the evening so mad at myself I couldn’t see straight.
I will also be ordering the Buffalo Tera Station RAID NAS device in the coming weeks and stop leaving my life up to my ability to do it for myself or to some application that may or may not be the best solution to the problem. The 2 TB model should be around $1,600 or so and will give me 1 TB of redundant RAID storage. At that price when you fill up one, buy another and string these things together. The RAID manager will alert you to a drive failure and you pop in a new drive and the RAID controller restores the data. Easy. Pricey, but peace of mind that is priceless.
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