Life Tip of the Day: Catastrophic HDD Failure
Saturday morning, the one and only hard drive on my home computer went kaplooey. I spent all of Saturday securing a new drive and fighting to install an OS on it and all of Sunday trying to get set back up and recover what I could from the old broken drive. In the end I was able to save most of what I care about, including all my in-development files for this blog, Petopia, and my other hunter pet projects. The only really important thing I lost was my personal e-mail. (All the e-mail for this blog and Petopia I route through GMail, so it’s all safe.) Still, that was something like three years of messages from family, friends, and business contacts so I am … reeling a bit. And I still have some recovery left — I need to install World of Warcraft and all the other massively-multiplayer online role-playing games that I play, for instance, plus all the smaller utilities (like the WoW Model Viewer and my HTML editing tools). Anyway, if you don’t do normal back-ups of your important stuff — well, you might want to take this opportunity and do one now. *grin*
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Sorry to hear that, Mania! I suffered not one but two monster meltdowns early last year, resulting in the loss of 60GB or more of data. Fortunately, a lot of my oldest stuff was already backed up on CD, but the amount of newer data I lost was staggering.
Since then, I have added a 300GB external hard drive to my rig, and I back up everything onto that. I make it a ritual to keep stuff like bookmarks, my personal game settings for different games, desktop schemes, etc. all backed up on the EHD in case of another meltdown. It’s reassuring to know that all that stuff is safe in case horror strikes again. For $150 or so, that EHD is the best safety investment I’ve yet made for my comp.
Branan of Steamwheedle Cartel
Ouch! That’s a lot of data lost.
In addition to a new hard drive, I also bought a bunch of blank DVDs on Saturday, plus a second hard drive. (We also bought some more RAM, since we were there and all. (Fry’s is a dangerous place for us!) But the RAM only fit my husband’s slightly older machine — we thought we both had DDR RAM, but I have DDR2 somehow — so he ended up with most of the goodies.) I’m going to burn all the old stuff I rescued to the DVDs and start using the second hard drive as my data drive. I was looking at an external drive for backups (and my husband thinks I should RAID the two drives I have now), but I haven’t decided exactly what to do there yet. Do you use software to handle your backups, or do you do it by hand?
As long as you know the names of the files you need to back up, it’s pretty easy to do it manually. My EHD is a Western Digital MyBook Essential Edition (and is 500GB, not 300; I wrote my first post at work, I couldn’t see the drive). When I get a new rig this fall or winter, I’ll be able to easily port all the data I’ve saved to the new comp and customize it quickly and easily. Safe and convenient, what more can you ask for? Except maybe Dash for raptors!
Try SpinRite 6, from Gibson Research Corporation (www.grc.com). There’s a lot of people out there who will swear that it can do miracles in recovering data from HDDs that seem to be hopelessly screwed.
Ah, good idea. I use GRC’s Shields UP security check every so often, but I had forgotten about SpinRite. Thanks!
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