A Hard Lesson in Backing Up

[christopher_platt]

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

[mjm]

2. you can try to use some type of disk copy utility. i have had luck recovering data from an almost dead disk that way.

[another view]

Can't imagine you have any recourse with the original seller of the Maxtor unless it was right after you opened the box. If it's in warranty, there may be that.

Sorry for your troubles, but it's a good reminder for the rest of us. A few months ago, I bought a Maxtor drive and have been backing up to that - as well as CD's. Over the last month or two, I've gotten pretty lazy and haven't burned any CD's. I'm going to get that done...

[Asylum Steve]

Christopher,

I can't help you with your recovery attempts, but I can tell you we've had quite a few discussions about the topic of backing up important files.

After many consultations with other members here, I finally decided on two 80G internal hds, a 240G Maxtor external hd, AND burning multiple backup CDs. There is more than triple redundancy here, and I keep the external hd disconnected as much as possible to cut down on the possibility of outside corruption.

It sounds like you're close to the same system, but as you've painfully discovered, one key is to be relentless when it comes to burning the files onto CDs to maintain your safety net.

As you say, we have to go on the assumption now that sooner or later a drive WILL fail, and we need to be ready.

Good luck with the recovery. I think you should be abe to save much of the data if you're willing to put the effort in...