A tale of warning...

[cdcox]

Near the end of August, I was sitting at my desk, working as normal with my trusty Nissan stainless steel coffee mug at my side. I really like this mug becuase it is insulated and has a lid to minimize spills. As I was reaching for my keyboard that morning, my hand bumped the coffee mug. My lightning reflexes prevented the mug from tipping over but a few drops of coffee did splatter and landed on the keyboard of my laptop. I quickly dabbed up the drops that were between the keys and went about my day.

That evening, I took my computer home. When I turned it on I got a error message from the BIOS. Hard drive not recognized. Uh-Oh (that's not an exact quote). Took the HD out of the bay and sure enough there were a couple drops of cofffee in there. Went through the Dell trouble shooting procedures, that basically confirmed the hard drive had failed and got a new one ordered.

But what about my data? I'm not real regular about backing up my files, even though I bought an external hard drive for this very purpose. It had been several months since I had done so, and I had A LOT of work that would take weeks to redo. For example the last time that I had backed up my nfl-forecast.com code was at the end of 2005. The source code for the improvements this year was gone. I also had a 60 page document that I had submitted once, but would need to resubmit, gone. Most of the work I had done over the summer was "in progress" which means that it would have to be re done. It went on and on.

So I sent my harddrive off to a data recovery service. They ended up having to disassemble my hard drive in a clean room, attach a new controller card to the drive and extract the data. Ten days later, it appeared that I had my data back, and I started to breathe a little easier. However, over the next several days it became apparent that they had successfully recovered the directory tree, but many, many files had 0 KB of data stored in them. Many of those that showed data would not open properly. And as chance would have it, the corrupted files were the ones I needed the most. Uh-Oh, part two (that is not an exact quote).

Last week I called the data recovery company back and explained my situation and asked why they hadn't told me that so many of the "recovered" files were empty (you have to pay before you see your data files). They explained that they had no way of knowing what was on the disk, so it was up to me to tell them if there was a problem with the recovered files, and they allowed 48 hours to do this. I explained that since the tech had told me that the recovery was successful and that the files appeared, that I had assumed they were there, and that I had only realized the extent of the problem after several days of my normal work routine. They agreed to take another look at the hard drive.

I finally got the recovered data back today. The files look good. But it was really touch and go for a while. I consider myself lucky to get off with a several hundred dollar bill and more than a few sleepless nights.

There have been a million of these stories told, but until it happens to you, you don't listen. Don't make that mistake. I was an idiot. Back up your files today, if you can't afford to be without them. Go on, do it now.

[Mr. Laz]

gotta love norton Ghost

[StcChief]

The old saying in IT stands......

Your only as good as your last successful backup.

[TrickyNicky]

Yeah, thats why I use one of those beer hats with coffee while working.

[ck_IN]

Flash drives are great for backing up files. I have on expressly for that purpose.

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by ck_IN

Flash drives are great for backing up files. I have on expressly for that purpose.

At least I hope you are joking. It's better than what I did, but only marginally.

[Fire Me Boy!]

My old employer found out the hard way that all the tapes they had been backing up the server on -- yes, old tape drives, gotta love 'em -- weren't working properly. Turns out, the tapes they bought in bulk, were default set to NOT tape over. Essentially, they had dozens of blank, basically brand new tapes, that had NEVER been recorded on.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by cdcox

At least I hope you are joking. It's better than what I did, but only marginally.

Eh, for basic backups, they're an inexpensive way of doing it as long as you're not backing up a huge amount of data. I have many customers who use a rotating schedule of flash drives to back up their QuickBooks data. Works great, and costs less than $100 to get started. They may not be as reliable as other backup media, but they give you redundancy at a low price.

[greg63]

Originally Posted by cdcox

...There have been a million of these stories told, but until it happens to you, you don't listen. Don't make that mistake. I was an idiot. Back up your files today, if you can't afford to be without them. Go on, do it now.

Yup! Kids don't let this happen to you.

[JBucc]

cdcox needs a sippy cup

[cdcox]

Originally Posted by JBucc

cdcox needs a sippy cup

That's basically what I have:

http://altura.speedera.net/ccimg.cat...ts/9196402.jpg

[ck_IN]

At least I hope you are joking.

Not at all. I wouldn't put enterprise database backups on them but for my home computer I backup word docs, my Microsoft Money, excel spreadsheets and my Turbo tax forms. I restore random files every now and then. I've never had any problem.

[Kyle401]

Heh,

We hired a newly minted technician (fresh out of school) a few months ago who somehow managed to delete the entire portfolio for one of our clients. No problem, I say to myself as I will just restore it from the backup. Unfortunately, that was the day that I found out that the backup procedure was screwed up somehow and all of our backup files were corrupted.

Needless to say, that day is one of my (and the newly minted technician's) most memorable days at work. Strangely, the technician found a different job a few weeks ago???

[HC_Chief]

Hard drives are cheap these days. If you have a desktop system, buy an extra hdd that matches your current, and configure a mirroring RAID. If one drive fails, the mirror takes over.

If you have a laptop, buy an external USB or Firewire drive... copy all of your files to it on a regular basis.

[ZepSinger]

I back up all important data and programs to DVD. Heck, they're like 35 cents apiece now.