So a few days ago my wife and I learned an expensive lesson about how the fragility of external hard drives and the curiosity of a 14 month year old just *do* _NOT_ mix.
When my son was born, I decided that I was going to keep all of my photos off on an external hard drive. That way, I reasoned, I could take it with me if I ever needed to show all bajilion photos and movies to interested friends and family (that circumstance, I should add, has never actually occurred).
I guess this wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, except that I have never gotten around to backing up said photos and movies of my son — Memories, as it were, since the moment he was born — either on DVD or otherwise.
Part of that was the lethargy in backing up almost 50-100 gigs of media and the fact that I had a broken DVD burner.
I had a great idea the other day that I should back it up online via JungleDisk as the prices to use Amazon’s A3 service is quite economical. Unfortunately, I was at about Day 9 out of 17 in my 24/7 back up, when the unstoppable force (my son) met the very fragile and very movable object that was my external hard drive.
Needless to say, my wife and I had a sickening feeling as we realized that we couldn’t access the drive any further.
What was the price to pay for our folly?
What was the price we paid for the memories of our son?
As for the latter question, at the time we thought “Anything!” And, of course, that’s sort of true even now. But what we did do is bring it to a data-recovery specialist near by (who has international offices), called WeRecoverData.com, who discovered that the fall caused “unit instability” and “logical errors”, requiring them to “manually rebuild file-system components”.
Final cost to attempt to recover all of this data?
$1300.
Well, after the sticker shock (and realization that this Christmas is going to be a little lot less generous) we have learned an expensive lesson in data management.
And you can bet that when we get it all back its going to get backed up in triplicate (or duplicate), with copies online, offline, and possibly hard copies as well.
<sigh>
7 Comments
After my work laptop experienced a “worst-case scenario” failure it spooked me enough to figure out how to backup our home systems more effectively.
My only catch – it couldn’t be something I had to remember to do. It just wouldn’t happen.
Been using mozy.com now (at work and home) for most of this year. Absolutely 100% reccomend it. $4.95 for unlimited backup on personal computers and it just chugs away in the background backing you up as the system idles.
For online backup and storage info, the best site I recommend is the Backup Review website:
http://www.BackupReview.info
@Ryan — that’s how JungleDisk works, actually … and I worked out the cost. The per gigabyte cost of using JungleDisk vs. Mozy is a bit cheaper. The sad thing is that my hard drive got wrecked in the middle of my first back up. :P
I’m backup crazy. I must have 3 external drives (2 at home, 1 at work) all which keep duplicate content of my personal laptop. Backing up is time consuming but after my first crash … I never want to go through that experience again. I did shell out the $1000+ for my photos. Some memories you just can’t put a price on. Anyways the guys at CBL data recovery (http://www.cbltech.ca) see it all the time, drives are doomed to fail. I chose the non-critical service 15 days, so my recovery originally $1650 was priced at $1250. Definitely an expensive lesson. JT
Well Tone, I’m glad to hear that you managed to recover the data, but the cost — yeouch.
For myself, I have lots of data all over the place. The way I back it up is as follows:
- resurrected my old PII machine.
- shoved in a couple of hard drives, one of which already had XP on it.
- shared it across my home network
- downloaded SyncToy (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx)
- set it up to sync my laptop (any anything else) across the network to the PII server.
- Voila! Instant backups. With my gigabit network at home (YAY gigabit!) I can backup 20+ GB of data in minutes.
That was my first attempt at this system. Were I to do it again I would modify the system by installing Linux on the backup server, slapping in two identical drives, and activating software RAID. Hook up your DVD burner for off-site backups and you’re good to go.
Backups are great. I only wish there was a way to standardize media (right…).
I’ve got hand-me-down reel to reel’s of us as kids from my parents.
Can I play those in my DVD player?
Ouch. Once I started looking for archive/backup of all the photos of my twins, my wife made it quite clear that my life depended on NEVER losing all of the photos ;)
So, I’m a little paranoid about how I backup. I use Microsoft’s FolderShare, and every Friday night all of the photos from the week get transferred directly to my work PC. Every three months I burn 3 DVDs – one stays at home, one goes to my work, and the third goes to my parents’ place.
I’m in the process of looking for an external drive, but I don’t like the prospect of a single point of failure meaning that everything could be gone.