Well about a week ago my 5 month new hard drive failed. BiOS just stopped recognising it completely.

 

I'm one of those people who tells all my friends and family to always backup, and I didn't do it myself! Moron!

 

So literally the past few years of my work is currently inaccessible, and this has happened at a very bad financial time for me.

 

By options now are;

 

A) Send it off to eBuyer, the company I bought it from, to 'try and repair it'. If they cant repair it, its company policy to destroy it (losing my data) and they'll send me a new one (not the point)

 

I gave my hdd to a techy friend for a few days and he said the PCB (card on back) is buggered, but the hard drive still works OK. Therefore I can buy another identical drive, and swap the PCB's over. Then if I want to be cheeky (kind of justified) I can get my data off it, then put that bad PCB back on it, and send to eBuyer. They'll say it cant be repaired (or even repair it) and I get myself another drive. One spare to backup to!

 

C) Send to a Data Recovery company. This starts from £79 and can go up to £400, depending on the extent of the damage. Unfortunately you don't know how much its going to cost until the work is done. A month ago I'd have done this without a seconds thought, but right now its not financially possible.

 

I'm going to go for B, wish me luck!

 

This has been genuinely traumatic, so please everyone, Backup, Backup, BACKUP!

I've learned this lesson the hard way too..

 

Always backup your data people!!!

Good old time machine for me!

 

Then manually backup my important stuff on a different external HD before turning the computer off everyday.

Good old time machine for me!

 

Then manually backup my important stuff on a different external HD before turning the computer off everyday.

 

 

That's awesome!

 

I have to get a Mac.

I'm looking at getting two 1TB external drives for backups and keeping on here in Stoke next to my computer for regular backups and keeping the other in Derby so I can backup to another geographic location every 2 months or so (incase the house burns down, not very unlikely we've already had 2 near kitchen fires in the last week ). Luckily I've never lost any data but I'm sitting on around 100GB of music I really don't want to lose let alone my uni and freelance work.

My hdd failed a while back too, i bought one of those recovery software packages online, paid about $80. It worked, it recovered almost everything. Unfortunately it couldn't get the file names, and some of the folder structures were out of wack.

 

I've still got 100's of files with names like 008b93c5d, eurgh! but i managed to find the projects i was working on, so it was ok.

 

I have an online backup, with a cheap webhost, as well as a spare hdd now.

Sorry to hear that Russ. Hope option B works. I would have gone with C, simply because I've done it before (with an employer's machine) and though not cheap, it worked. But option B sounds logical.

 

My own approach is to have an internal 1Tb in the home server, an external 1Tb plugged in to the home server via USB, and backup both the laptops onto both the big drives overnight once a week, keeping the last 4 copies. I should probably do it twice a week.

 

It doesn't take as long as it sounds, because I just backup Docs & Settings, Inetpub and a couple of other places, and I simply do it with an XCOPY batch file which I launch as I go to bed.

ah tough love. i hope you get all your stuff back cause your designs are amazing. the national gallery should really be paying for the retrieval.

 

I back everything upto a webserver. eg when i upload a site the psd or whatever goes up there as well. and all of my client contact details and reports are all on google docs so i hope thats ok. although what if i get locked out? or they crash? no idea, but im sure its a lot safer and cheaper and doing it locally.

I have three hard drives in my home computer, So i normally end up having a backup on each of the drives, as well been stored on the hostings servers.

 

Sometimes i may burn everything to a DVD disk and date it.

 

I have used this little adapter http://www.gizoo.co.uk/products/pcgaming/p...esatadriver.htm a few times to connect IDE/SATA notebook & desktop harddrives to my main machine to get data.

I don't really trust hard drives as a means of backing up data in the long term, anything with moving parts will eventually fail, so i back up to DVD pretty often (it's about time i do it again as well i think), the only thing i'm fairly lazy about backing up is my music, i'd hate to loose it all, but it's not as important to me as my .PSD files, photos, and work.

Phoned up Seagate, there is a known fault in these particular hard drives, and yesterday it got picked up by a courier to be repaired, and have the data recovered (Subsidiary company of seagate - i365).

 

They said it will be free of charge assuming its an easy fix, if not they will charge. Iam ready to argue against that though, and hopefully make sure there is no charge (you sold me a faulty hard drive, and you want me to payyou to fix your own mistake?)

 

When I have my data back I'm going to buy 2 1TB hdd's, one internal one external, and start backing up my important stuff.

 

Worst part is I've let down a client in this process, as the design I made for his puzzle website is trapped in that hard drive, and I can't really apologise enough to the guy.

 

Well, I guess I'm learning the hard way!