Back up your Hard Disk regularly !

[Strangeways]

I spent 24 years in IT and specialized in a number of areas, one of them being Data Center Backup and Disaster Recovery.

My old PC was having issues, and my work PC needed an upgrade. So I started to back up the data from the machines, onto my NEW External Drive, one by one.

Work PC - Once I had the data on an (expensive) external drive, I was confident I had everything, so I formatted the old drives to do a fresh Windows 10 install.

Home PC - With most of my restoration documentation. Literally GIGS of photos. I copied the data, then formatted one of the drives ready for a re install on a new Hard Disk. While I was waiting for this to happen, I started receiving Hard Disk errors on all my drives ! I rebooted after the PC locked up, and EVERYTHING BACKED UP on the NEW and EXPENSIVE backup drive was gone.

I took the drive to my work PC - Not recognized. Removed the drive from the casing and tried everything = DEAD drive, but still spinning.

Currently, the drive is at a professional Data Recovery Centre and I WILL get all the data back - but at quite a cost..

I might have to look at these Solid State Drives from now on. But for now, I will just have to wait for the cost of recovering the disk 

Morale of the story - Back up your data - OFTEN..

[MartyJ]

Cloud storage.  You don't need to worry about backups or failure of spinning media


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[pinnies4me]

Couldn't agree more.  Early this year we suffered a cyber attack, and then found that our back up disk had failed.... Quite some grief! We now have mirrored drives on the server, a back up to a NAS box that backs itself up to another, and two separate critical data back ups, one manually nightly as well. Feel much safer, although very vigilant these days.

[pinnies4me]

Cloud storage.  You don't need to worry about backups or failure of spinning media


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We switched to a software supplier for our data management three years ago. It lasted a week. At the end of the first week their system decided the documents on their server (the original raw ones I had spent a week modifying ) were more up to date and replaced all mine with raw ones again!

[robm]

I had a mate go through a similar experience as you Nino. Since then i have signed up to dropbox, $120 a year is VERY cheap insurance when compared to data recovery costs. Plus dropbox being accessible anyway has been very convenient.  I have around 700GB on dropbox, although it did take quite a few months of hitting my uploaf limit to get it all there. Now, every single file on my computer is instantly synched with dropbox

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[Boots]

Don't format and reinstall
Buy a new hard drive and leave the old one asis

[Strangeways]

I had a mate go through a similar experience as you Nino. Since then i have signed up to dropbox, $120 a year is VERY cheap insurance when compared to data recovery costs. Plus dropbox being accessible anyway has been very convenient.  I have around 700GB on dropbox, although it did take quite a few months of hitting my uploaf limit to get it all there. Now, every single file on my computer is instantly synched with dropbox

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That's what I'm looking at using - I used to use Cloud storage in the "early days", but security was very poor.

Don't format and reinstall
Buy a new hard drive and leave the old one asis

It is one physical disk and it had bad sectors only on the OS "C Drive". The access time to the other partitions was very poor. The only way to fix was a low level format, OS install and give that PC to the kids to much around on. All the data was safely retrieved to the new external drive - which died.

[MartyJ]

Couldn't agree more.  Early this year we suffered a cyber attack, and then found that our back up disk had failed.... Quite some grief! We now have mirrored drives on the server, a back up to a NAS box that backs itself up to another, and two separate critical data back ups, one manually nightly as well. Feel much safer, although very vigilant these days.

Unfortunately the only time when backup's are properly checked / verified is when there is a major problem...
Certainly having mirrored drives and a NAS is good, but you really need a full backup (nightly) which is offsite or cloud

[pinnies4me]

Couldn't agree more.  Early this year we suffered a cyber attack, and then found that our back up disk had failed.... Quite some grief! We now have mirrored drives on the server, a back up to a NAS box that backs itself up to another, and two separate critical data back ups, one manually nightly as well. Feel much safer, although very vigilant these days.

Unfortunately the only time when backup's are properly checked / verified is when there is a major problem...
Certainly having mirrored drives and a NAS is good, but you really need a full backup (nightly) which is offsite or cloud

You're probably right. My IT guy did say he had some other plans to implement so I suspect it'll be cloud.

[Strangeways]

The good news is that the disk has bad sectors. So it is currently having a "sector by sector" copy to a new disk. I've seen the setup, and it sure is expensive technology - but almost all data will be retrieved from my Drive 

[Strangeways]

The disk was 99% recoverable - Cost me $500.

Cost is not an issue - There are teardowns of 8 machines that are required for re assembly. There's no way I can re assemble A Superman or Bow and Arrow without photos !

The Tech told me to keep away from Seagate and Western Digital Drives. They are cheap and nasty. Buy Hitachi where possible, but his ultimate recommendation was to buy Solid State Drives.

[pinnies4me]

The disk was 99% recoverable - Cost me $500.

Cost is not an issue - There are teardowns of 8 machines that are required for re assembly. There's no way I can re assemble A Superman or Bow and Arrow without photos !

The Tech told me to keep away from Seagate and Western Digital Drives. They are cheap and nasty. Buy Hitachi where possible, but his ultimate recommendation was to buy Solid State Drives.

Good stuff. We had one fail when the office was small and just a couple of us. I was amazed that they were able to recover virtually everything, glad they could for you.

[pinball god]

Good to hear.