What are the odds of this one?

[howesey]

We bought a USB/FW external HDD two days ago. Its role is to backup data. My dad goes to switch on his laptop, and the HDD is clicking, has a grinding sound... It's failed. Three years, used every day, and it has to fail now. Awful thing is, it was that new we didn't have a chance to backup onto that drive. Lucky he has done backups of his address books etc two weeks ago onto a 1GB pen drive, but still not the large backup of his documents. New HDD is easy, but trying to get the docs back may be harder. Just tried Windows CD and Knoppix to recover the data to the external drive, both wont load the HDD.

Moral of the story, backup ASAP when you get an external HDD.

 

[Abstract]

[Nelson's Voice]
Ha ha!
[/Nelson]

 

[kretzy]

That really sucks. There might be places around that can retrieve the data, have a look around on the net.

 

[0098386]

extremely similar thing happened to me.
bought PowerBook. weeks later I got an external HDD case. I took my old 60gb HDD from my old PC for the casing. Bam! It was all cool. the drive worked until I plugged it into my downstairs PC where the drive just totally failed on me. Windows said it was because I didn't eject the drive or something. but it had not been touched?

Anyways I used some recovery software and got back some files. but I did lose a lot of old work. nothing serious, more nostalgia.

 

[quigleybc]

ouch....


I am obsessed with backing every little thing up to DVD's or CD's

but man, that hurts,

sorry to hear it.

 

[alexstein]

Sorry to hear about your misfortune. It always sucks when stuff like that happens.

In 2004 my PC had a HDD failure and I lost all my data.(lots of family pictures) I was never to hot on backing my data up even though I had a couple of data discs backed up but still most the stuff was gone. I guess I learned the hard way. One of the first things I've got for my iBook was an external HDD to back up my data. I do it now on a scheduled basis by-monthly.

 

[erickkoch]

Sorry about what happened but thanks for the reminder. I'm doing a backup now on my external HD using SuperDuper. It's a small FireLite HD and fits inside my fire safe.

While I think it's good to make backups, you've got to consider how safe your backup disks or HD's are. I'm kind of paranoid about my photos so I keep a copy of my pics and docs on a disk and have my mom store them at her place in her fire safe. I update them about once a year or so. If my place burns down or is broken into at least I've got a copy of most of my photos and important files in another location.

 

[iEdd]

In my opinion, the best way to backup stuff is to do daily or weekly exact bootable copies of your HD onto an external Hard Drive. The chance of them failing at the same time is highly unlikely. For really important stuff, burn it onto cd or dvd aswell.