Crashed hard drive...

zboss · Oct 10, 2005

OK - it finally happened... the hard drive on which I store all my photos and personal documents, failed. I've had hard drive failures before but none that contained important documents before. I was using an external maxtor drive (I figured if there was a fire or something it would be an easy grab).

I'm just posting to say that I bought "Recover My Files" from www.recovermyfiles.com and had great luck - I was able to retrieve most of my photos; so if you are looking for a program of this sort I would recommend it.

I just ordered two 400 GB hard drives and am going to put them in a mirrored array to prevent this from happening again. I would suggest that any of you folks out there that have not done so - do so.

My 2 cents.

Halthron · Oct 10, 2005

During our move this summer, my wife lost a drive and one of mine became unreliable. We had some of our stuff backed up but not everything. Since my PC was getting old and was going to be upgraded soon, I ordered a motherboard that'll do the mirroring at the hardware level for greater speed. Between mirroring on my machine and backing up to DVD (rewritables) on each, we won't have an excuse now for losing data.

Land Locked · Oct 10, 2005

I guess I'm just anal about this, but ever since a friend of mine had
a house fire, I use multiple backups. I recovered about 70% of his drive
but he had lost some important financial information. I have an internal E:
dive I backup to monthly just in case my C: drive goes. I use CD and DVD
RW on a regular basis. I have an external hard drive for storing documents
and I network to my laptop to store files. One important note, personal
experience, if you encrypt files for security you better backup your encrytption
key to another drive. If you don't, you may recover the files but never be able to
access them due to the lost encryption key.

aHeavyD · Oct 10, 2005

Wow, I had a Maxtor exteral hard drive for back up and would put it in my safe when I go out of town, it died too. Talk about loosing all my good stuff.

Bob3 · Oct 11, 2005

Seagate hard drives have a 5 year warranty, Maxtor has a 1 year. I LIKE Seagates.

Halthron · Oct 11, 2005

I was unaware that a warranty covered lost data, I thought it only covered the drive

herman · Oct 11, 2005

That's the reason I have redundant hard drives with a complete set of pictures on each and back up to DVDs every time I come back from a trip. Glad to hear you got most of your pictures back.

zboss · Oct 11, 2005

Well - I am getting into the habit of sending my pics up to webshots now... as soon as I get back from whatever I was shooting.

Rick Murchison · Oct 11, 2005

I download to my primary video/picture drive, my backup (USB external) drive, and archive to CD or DVD (depending on size) after every trip.
Right now the primary, backup and archive copies live in three different rooms of my house. I'm contemplating a fire-proof safe for the archives.
Rick

MikeC · Oct 11, 2005

Uncle Rick, don't forget that CD's and DVD's aren't forever storage despite what many claim. Some CD's have become unreadable in as little as 12-18 months.

Crashed hard drive...

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