Do What I Say, Not What I Do
Last Update: May 21, 2012
So Mr. Irony came and took a big ole chunk out of my butt this weekend. For years I've told friends, family, and anyone else that asked that you should always backup your important data. Keep a couple copies in different places if it's REALLY important. Good advice and I still stand by it. Unfortunately, I only STOOD by it and didn't actually USE said advice...and as the first line stated, Mr. Irony stopped by this weekend.
I got home from work Friday all excited because I had received the UPS notices that my new goodies had arrived. Reading Ivetriedthat's blog about his recent PC build put the bee in my bonnet to do a few upgrades so I bought a SSD drive and a new case for my workhorse.
Got the guts moved to the new case and the OS loaded on the new drive pretty quickly. Things are looking good!
Installed my original drive so I could copy my data over... This is where things took a turn for the worst. In the middle of copying data, I noticed the 'copy' window froze.
Strange...
Opened up 'My Computer' and noticed my original drive had disappeared.
Ummmm..
Then I heard it. That very distinctive 'click click' sound of a harddrive off in the weeds. Suddenly I felt very ill because I knew that I hadn't backed up this drive in quite a while. I tried changing BIOS settings, uninstalling the new drive and booting off the original again..I even tried it in another machine hoping I could get it to recognize just one more time so I could grab as much as I could before it dies for good. But alas, my efforts have been futile and I have almost conceded defeat (I've got one more idea to try before I use the drive for target practice).
There was a very small sliver of silver lining though. While 99% of what I lost IS replaceable..just a pain in the butt to do it.. Probably my most important file, the keyword progress list for my website, was long ago copied to Google documents and kept up to date on there. So I guess it wasn't a TOTAL loss. LOL
So after a very long weekend of PC building and software loading, I've almost got my PC back to a workable state. I am also going to look into backup solutions for a home system so I don't have to do this again!
I got home from work Friday all excited because I had received the UPS notices that my new goodies had arrived. Reading Ivetriedthat's blog about his recent PC build put the bee in my bonnet to do a few upgrades so I bought a SSD drive and a new case for my workhorse.
Got the guts moved to the new case and the OS loaded on the new drive pretty quickly. Things are looking good!
Installed my original drive so I could copy my data over... This is where things took a turn for the worst. In the middle of copying data, I noticed the 'copy' window froze.
Strange...
Opened up 'My Computer' and noticed my original drive had disappeared.
Ummmm..
Then I heard it. That very distinctive 'click click' sound of a harddrive off in the weeds. Suddenly I felt very ill because I knew that I hadn't backed up this drive in quite a while. I tried changing BIOS settings, uninstalling the new drive and booting off the original again..I even tried it in another machine hoping I could get it to recognize just one more time so I could grab as much as I could before it dies for good. But alas, my efforts have been futile and I have almost conceded defeat (I've got one more idea to try before I use the drive for target practice).
There was a very small sliver of silver lining though. While 99% of what I lost IS replaceable..just a pain in the butt to do it.. Probably my most important file, the keyword progress list for my website, was long ago copied to Google documents and kept up to date on there. So I guess it wasn't a TOTAL loss. LOL
So after a very long weekend of PC building and software loading, I've almost got my PC back to a workable state. I am also going to look into backup solutions for a home system so I don't have to do this again!
Join the Discussion
IveTriedThat
Premium
Get Backblaze.
$50 a year. It includes unlimited data storage, History revisions, access to your files via Internet and all that good stuff.
In the meantime, consider putting the drive in the freezer for an hour or two. It sounds nuts, but you may be able to access the data for a limited amount of time. It's a nifty trick that I picked up a few years ago and it has helped me recover some lost data.
Man, and I was so excited to hear of your new upgrades too.
$50 a year. It includes unlimited data storage, History revisions, access to your files via Internet and all that good stuff.
In the meantime, consider putting the drive in the freezer for an hour or two. It sounds nuts, but you may be able to access the data for a limited amount of time. It's a nifty trick that I picked up a few years ago and it has helped me recover some lost data.
Man, and I was so excited to hear of your new upgrades too.
jchilders
Premium
Yeah the freezer trick was the 'one more idea' I mentioned. :) I'd heard about it but hadn't tried it yet, crossing my fingers though.
On a much happier note, the case and SSD are AWESOME!!! I already had a 4 drive RAID set up on another machine but the drives ran so hot I got burned unhooking them. Put them in the bay directly in front of the fan and they stay nice an cool now! I need to get a little longer cables though, it's not quite as clean as your setup yet. ;)
I'll take a look at Backblaze too.
On a much happier note, the case and SSD are AWESOME!!! I already had a 4 drive RAID set up on another machine but the drives ran so hot I got burned unhooking them. Put them in the bay directly in front of the fan and they stay nice an cool now! I need to get a little longer cables though, it's not quite as clean as your setup yet. ;)
I'll take a look at Backblaze too.
nathaniell
Premium
I would like to know how someone figured out that putting a hard drive in the freezer could help get lost data.
nathaniell
Premium
After reading this post, I'm thinking it would be a good idea to back stuff up. I'm not sure what I need to back up though - I mean all of my wordpress stuff is sent to dropbox automatically, and I store a lot of other stuff on Gmail. What's some others stuff that typically needs to be backed up?
And is backblaze much different from drop box or surgarsync? I'm not really sure if there's a difference between online storage and backup service.
Sorry for hijacking your blog post jchilders :)
And is backblaze much different from drop box or surgarsync? I'm not really sure if there's a difference between online storage and backup service.
Sorry for hijacking your blog post jchilders :)
jchilders
Premium
@nathaniell - No problem. :) The backup I am looking at is for my home PC, not my websites. So things like PDFs and software that you download, data files and documents you've created, basically anything that you have created or don't have an install disk for should be backed up.
Online storage and backup services are similar in that they both store files 'offsite' from your computer. I think the biggest difference is that a backup service is typically automated in some way..such as automatically uploading new versions of files so that the latest are always stored. Online storage would be a manual process, like Google Documents. I'm sure there are other differences too, but that's the main one that comes to mind for me.
Online storage and backup services are similar in that they both store files 'offsite' from your computer. I think the biggest difference is that a backup service is typically automated in some way..such as automatically uploading new versions of files so that the latest are always stored. Online storage would be a manual process, like Google Documents. I'm sure there are other differences too, but that's the main one that comes to mind for me.
relaxing_piano
Premium
Been there done that, got the tshirt! I've worked in tech jobs and saw hard drives fail unexpectedly. Rarely do they give notice. Yet, it seems like we still love to collect those tshirts! I now use Crashplan - great price and it backs up locally and offsite. It will backup to almost any place I want. Best thing is, if some major disaster hits my home, my data is safe in an offsite place - and I barely can tell it is backing anything up. Used to be with Mozy, until they got greedy.
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