A BRUTAL lesson learned!!

[Doug]

In short, my hard drive suddenly cratered into oblivion a couple weeks ago with all info lost over the years on everything imaginable along with coins and four families worth of genealogy. The Yosts' to the early 1700's Germany too boot!!! NO, this moron, didn't back things up on the computer but I do have hard copies that will have to be entered all over again. Months and maybe a year of work to recoup my previous records is an understatment! Yes, it was stupid on my part to overlook the simple task of backing up files but I thought I'd share my crisis here in the hope my problem may urge friends here @ Coppercoins to see to it backing up ALL files is beyond mandatory! Buying and installing a new hard drive and starting over from absolutely nothing on your computer/ground zero is NO fun and beyond a daunting task to hopefully get back up to some semblence of speed. Back up everything my friends as the unfortunate crash NOT related to a virus or hacker my bite you in the posterior as well!

[Mark]

Doug:

There are places that attempt to retrieve data from failed hard drives. I have no idea of the expense, but if you have enough data, it might be worth a short search using Google to see what you can find. In the meanwhile, you have my sympathies!

Mark

[coppercoins]

Oh, man....not a good thing at all. Sorry to hear of this unfortunate problem. One thing that I can offer is that mark is correct...there are many firms around that will recover data from a bad hard drive, and they are successful most of the time. One thing though is that they are quite expensive. Expect at least 2-3 hours of work for at least $100 per hour....but most of the time they are successful.

Usually when a hard drive crashes it's only one sector or one track that goes bad that keeps the whole thing from working. The remainder of the drive is fine. What they do is connect it to a system that can tell the drive it is a slave data drive, and they can pull files off it without a problem if you can tell them generally where to look for the files. They have specialized computers and software to do this.

Let me know if there is anything I can do for you to help...I'll certainly do whatever is in my power, Doug...I'm at your disposal if you ever need me.

[Bob P]

Doug,
Sorry to hear about your misfortunes. I too had a major hard drive failure a couple of months ago. I had some things backed up, but not the important stuff like all the photos I took and other programs I use to update the coppercoins site. That led to a severe slowdown of data inputs to which I have finally caught up. I back up everything now...as often as is necessary. I hope you can recover your geneology stuff though. That material must have been wonderful to research and read.
So, to piggy back on your statement, BACK UP DATA OFTEN. It isn't always a virus or hacker who messes up your stuff. Power failures, bad single sectors, and children without a clue can also hurt you. I hope if you choose to use a recovery service, that they can retrieve everything you need.

Bob P

[Steve]

That really bytes when that happens! I lost my laptop drive a while back, but luckily, I was able to find some free software tools that let me restore the boot sector and read the drive even though the FAT was corrupted. I was able to retrieve all of my documents and most of the data files I needed once I reinstalled the programs.