So you’re tooling along down the information super highway, you’ve got your emails saved to your harddrive, maybe all of your children’s photos from the last six months or maybe that important file your boss had you work on while you were on vacation. One day, you notice that your harddrive is beinging to make noises like the brakes on your first car (you know, that 1978 nova that you thought was Da’ Bomb!). You hear a scratching or a grinding coming from the drive and fearing the worst, you power your computer down before you copy anything to another disc or burn it to dvd (cd?).

Thinking things are cool, you give it a day or two to chill, after all, you know how it is when you work all day, sometimes you just need a day off, right? Except you power back on your computer and plowie (yea, its a word) your computer fails to see the drive, or it sees it except windows or linux can’t mount it. Then it starts to sink in, you have lost all your files. You try everything, you tap the drive in every location, you spin it on your desk, you freeze the drive over night in the hopes that the tip sites are right and you can salvage the drive long enough to copy your data off, except nothing works. Then, in a frenzied panic, you take the drive to a data recovery specialist (like Cherry Systems).

In general, these places can retrieve your data from almost certain death as long as your willing to pay. Most places start at a cost of around $500 and go up from there as high as $2400, but to you, its worth it if you can get back those precious files. Except this time, they can’t. The damage has been compared to the damage a brake rotor might see when the pads have worn all the way down and you have that wonderful grinding noise that you think you can live with for just a couple more miles… Then it hits you, you have the CD burner, and the blank CD’s why haven’t you backed anything up??

Thats what the wife and I are experiencing right now. We lost the secondary drive in our desktop at home, and it happened to have the digital photos on it from last year. Most of Emm’s first year, Grace’s 3rd birthday, Christmas and who knows what else…. gone because we didn’t copy our files to cd.

It would have taken less than 30 minutes to copy everything to cd, even less if we had been doing it as step two after removing the photos from the digital camera and its an expensive lesson to learn. As someone in the IT field, its been ingrained in me that backups are important (we keep customer files for anywhere from three to seven years here at work), we have software and hardware that handles all that for us when its working properly (thats another long post). However, from a home user stand point, I’ve always been of the opinion that it isn’t that important, yea I’ve lost files in the past (music, reports and other various files…) that I’ve just redone or found again if I really needed them, this is the first time we’ve lost anything along the lines of this and it really drives the importance of backing up, or at the very least copying the raw images to cd first.

I will say, Cherry Systems was very fast in responding to the drive and if we had taken it in or even copied things off of it when we first started having issues with the system we’d still have the photos. In the future, I’ll keep their business card close by in case I need something recovered….

Oh, and make sure you back up….

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