February 22, 2006

Doorstop

That's what my computer turned into last night. My brother-in-law, who is our resident hardware guru, was unable to save the hard drive. *POOF* - everything gone.

Four years worth of work, pictures, music, emails, applications/scripts I've written, web sites I've built......

Some I can get back from other sources; most of my music is on my MP3 player, the finalized versions of the web sites are on the server, etc. My pictures, however, will be gone forever, as will all the recent work I have been doing in Photoshop. All my PERL scripts. All my - ARGH, I just can't stand to think about it.

I looked up DataDoctors - their cheapest plan is $350. Ouch!

Two points:

  • Does anyone know a cheaper solution?
  • I could have avoided the hassle with an additional hard drive, which I could have gotten for less than $150. Think about that if you don't have a back-up solution in place.

UPDATE: 160GB external hard drive - $99.99. [sigh]

Posted by Vox at February 22, 2006 03:17 PM | TrackBack | work
Comments

A similiar thing happened to a friend of mine last year. I helped her recover the files she desperately needed off the messed up hard drive she had by using a piece of software I found for free on the net called PC Inspector File Recovery.

Posted by: Mike at February 23, 2006 08:23 AM

If you do by a backup drive and it does NOT come with software that automatically schedules backups, I would definitely invest in that. Both of my computers are set up to back themselves up twice a week without my doing anything. If you left it to me, my backup drives would be empty.

Posted by: Special Agent Johnny Utah at February 23, 2006 09:46 AM