I wanted to relate a story to everyone. I used to be super paranoid, backing up all of my images onto two CDs. I bought an external hard drive, planning to use that as my backup. Now, I had planned to also keep burning them onto CDs, but I ran out of CDs and money, and got lazy about it. Skip ahead a couple of weeks. My daughter turns 1 year old today, and for the last 3 months I have been working on a video for my wife of our daughter's first year. Because of the way my hard drive was partitioned, I no longer had space to continue working on the video. So I put it on my external hard drive and took it to one of the lab computers at my school to continue working on it. After I did, I copied it back onto the hard drive and took it home. In the process of copying it back onto my now un-partitioned hard drive of my computer, the hard drive died. Thankfully, I had left a copy on the school computer, and one of the guys from IT emailed me that they were going to delete it. Again, thankfully, he didn't get around to it. After lots of trouble trying to put it on 3 DVDs (which takes a LONG time with the 1x burners they have) none of the DVDs would verify correctly and the files were corrupted. I finally called a local computer store (ComputerWorks in Seaside, CA- If you're ever in the area, they're the people to go to) and they told me that I could connect my laptop directly to the lab computer and get the file that way, and it's busy copying as I type this. On that external hard drive, however, were about 400 images over the last couple months of my daughter, memories that I may never get back.
So, I wanted to write this so that you could learn from my experience: if your files have ANY value to you at all, make at least two backups, you never know when a drive is going to fail. I take that back - you do know: at the worst possible time, drives fail.
Now, I have two questions to go along with this story:
1. I bought a Maxtor 120gb online. When I received it, however, it was a Hitachi Deskstar. When I showed the drive to a friend (after it had died), he said that Deskstars are known to fail pretty frequently. Do I have any recourse against the dealer that I bought the drive from, short of returning it and never having a chance and getting my images back?
2. Does anyone know of a place I can send the drive to in order to recover my files, without paying an arm and a leg?
Thank you,
Chip