Wait...Backup...Now, Go!

You'd think I would have learned to practice what I've preached all these years - I'm always telling people to back up their data, purchase an external hard drive or backup system, or just burn it to CDs - but somehow I neglected to backup my own. As fate would have it, my computer crashed a couple of weeks ago and took several gigs of not just data but my precious years of mp3s! Actually, I'm not sure which loss hurts me the most, the data, or my music! Oh, but the story gets better, shortly after the desktop computer crashed, forcing me to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows, my laptop also shut down on me and just refused to boot up again, even with the power cord plugged in. Searching online for possible answers, it seems the problem with the laptop could be the power supply, which is going to run me at least $150, in addition to the new battery pack that it already needed, that's another $150.

My laptop had all of the same software as my desktop, and also a separate collection of several thousand mp3s, but I can't access any of that until I shell out some money. I'm working again on the desktop PC but I haven't reinstalled any software because I'm hoping to get the data professionally recovered, and reinstalling any software or saving files will overwrite what still resides on the hard drive. So I'm working bare bones right now.

I figured this was a perfect time to remind everyone to BACK THAT THANG UP! lol Don't end up nearly in a heap of tears as I was. You would have thought a relative died, who knew one could be so attached to files???? As time goes by with no recovery, I'm starting to let go of it in my mind, a little bit at a time. With every day, I find myself thinking, well, I could possibly recreate/rewrite/redownload that, but while I could maybe survive without what I lost, my kids had some things on that computer that they are pretty hurt about and I would feel bad at not at least attempting to recover their things.

Professional data recovery is no joke either. I'm looking at prices ranging from $150 to as high as $800, depending on the amount of data to be recovered. What I'm leaning toward right now is purchasing two replacement computers, one desktop and one laptop, and then letting them both go to the shop, so I'm not under a crunch to get them out.

Here's the thing though, this PC actually crashed on me about three years ago, and I found this wonderful program called Easeus Data Recovery for less than $100. I was skeptical at first but I tried the trial and I got excited when during the initial scan I could SEE my missing data flashing past me on the screen, so obviously everything was still there. This must be how criminals are caught - you never completely ERASE anything from your computer! Even if I were to overwrite it by rebuilding the system right now, let me commit a crime and CSI could still get my files back! Anyway, I sprung for the software and ran it with my heart caught in my throat - and it WORKED. Just beautifully. It took a couple of hours to complete but I think it recovered close to 100% of my files. About 20% of them were dumped into a folder called Raw Files because the software couldn't identify them, but I could easily see what they were and I just needed to sit and rename them all.

You would think I had learned my lesson then, right? I should have ran out and bought a backup system three years ago, but that kept getting pushed to the bottom of list of To Dos, Not wanting to spare the $150 bucks - and the price on external hard drives has dropped tremendously, along with everything else, so now I can get a 500 gig USB hard drive for as low as $130. Still, you can't put a price on something like this, I should have paid for the external drive years ago, and I wouldn't be here now.

Anyway, I pulled out my Easeus software, which I kept on a flash drive because you can't recover from the same drive from which you run the program - but it keeps getting to a point in the recovery where it freezes and then restarts itself. I wrote to technical support - excellent and prompt, by the way, and they want me to send screen shots and logs, so hopefully they will have a solution and not tell me that the disk is damaged and I'll have to take it in to a professional. I'm hoping to avoid that, but if I can't, I'll stop fighting it and drop it off somewhere.

I still recommend the Easeus software because it does work, they have excellent support and free upgrades, for about $86. Also, the external or portable hard drives are so cheap that you absolutely need one so you can just unplug it from your computer and take it to another system and keep working. My plan is to install both my software and save my files to the external, because its a pain to reinstall and reconfigure all of those, but at the very least, get one and keep your files on it, because software is always replaceable, data is not.

The absolute cheapest option for saving data only is a 2 GB flash drive for about $25, or 1 GB for even less. I carry around a couple of 512MB drives and they hold a LOT of files, but you may need a few of them if you're going to store mp3s on them. However, as I said, they're the cheapest option, even if you have to purchase one 2GB drive a month and keep them organized, anything is better than nothing. It can be a pain, however, to remember to unplug them wherever you use them, because I've encountered and read about problems with the USB ports from leaving them plugged in, and I've often left mine plugged in at work accidentally.

Burning to data CDs might actually be cheaper, and again, something is better than nothing, but I would try to avoid this because its time consuming and the CDs can be scratched and damaged unless you're extraordinarily careful with them. Speaking of cds, with all of this technological progress, when is someone going to come out with scratch-free CD-Rs????

Oh, I put up the Joomla blogsticker because I have article about Open Source software that I have to rewrite (sigh), but I'll try to get that one up this weekend.