Dealing With Data Loss

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/23/BU244981.DTL&type=tech' target='_blank'>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...1.DTL&type=tech</a><br /><br /></div>Have you ever dealt with a crashed hard drive with no backup? In my many years of consulting, I've come across it many times - and I've even suffered it once myself. 8O DriveSavers apparently has a professional "crisis counselor" on board to help with people's emotions.<br /><br />"'People get upset -- very, very upset,' Chessin told me. 'They yell. They cry. They need someone to listen to them and let them vent. That's what I'm here for.' She works for DriveSavers, which specializes in recovering data from even the most devastated computer system, such as a laptop crushed beneath the wheel of a MacWorld shuttle bus or a PowerBook that spent two days at the bottom of the Amazon River (both true stories)."<br /><br />She's not exaggerating. Data loss is a horrible thing to most people. We once had a random customer walk into our office crying his heart out. He was traveling south from Connecticut but his luggable unit's hard drive failed. He apparently had 5+ years of his life in that machine, and it was all gone (and couldn't afford the professional repair at the time). :cry:<br /><br />What's the moral of this story? <b>Make sure you back up</b> any and all electronic devices, including your Pocket PC! Yeah, you, who's reading this right now and doesn't have any backup. I've dealt with types like you. ;)<br /><br />Anyone have sob stories they'd like to share?

[jizmo]

..such as a laptop crushed beneath the wheel of a MacWorld shuttle bus or a PowerBook that spent two days at the bottom of the Amazon River (both true stories)."

Does this mean macs are more likely to get abused this way? ;)

/jizmo

[jizmo]

I've lost a few dozen of my artwork when hard-drive has crashed (thx to Quantum Bigfoot), but one time my data was completely lost due to different kind "crash".

I was moving out of an apartment and still had two days left before moving out. I had moved all my furniture to the new flat, expect for three 50 liter plastic trashbags which contained all my little items, including my life's whole backup in zip-disks. I was out of town for that day, so my friend went go get the last stuff from there only to notice that new guy had already moved in. No biggie here, but when he asked where the plastic bags are, the new guy said he had thrown them to garbage after consulting with the landlord. Without even looking in the bags. :roll:

Quick phonecalls to landlord and this new guy and I had them picking my stuff from garbage in less than an hour. Damn, was I pissed. All the artwork I've done in my life, all my texts, tunes, etc etc etc, both on zip disks and a huge pile of hand drawn papers.. Simply non-replaceable stuff. The only joy I got from it was the vision of them, digging into that pile of ****e trying to locate my stuff.

/jizmo

[Buddha]

Mine is not a real sob story since it has a happy ending :D I've just had a hard-reset happen because I've been sick for a couple of days and I was so sick that I couldn't see a computer screen or anything that emitted light for several days. Unfortunatly I had left my ipaq half-charged next to the cradle instead of in it! So after several days laying there it hard-resetted. I had several important documents on there that I had written (really wouldn't want to have to rewrite them!) and didn't have a copy of on the desktop yet... Fortunaltly I had just made a new backup a couple of days before so thanks to the back-up I didn't loose ANYTHING! :) Once again showing how important and handy it can be to make regular backups!

[WindWalker]

I have a DriveSavers story from work.

A couple of years a ago, I managed a team of desktop technicians in the bank I work for. One of my techs told me that she wasn't feeling well, just before she was going to put in a hard drive for a user. I asked her to go ahead and do the job, then head home.

She got into the work, and I'm sure you all fondly recall the joys of FDISK and partition management. Suffice to say, she got the partitions a touch mixed up, and ended up wiping out the drive that had all the data on it. The user was a developr who had an Iomega Jaz drive, but had never backed up a thing in the two years he had the drive! Tech comes back to me distraught that she has trashed this data.

I clear it with my boss before I get going, but I call DriveSavers and send them the drive. Within a week, they had recovered the drive, copied the files to CDs and sent it all back to me. Of course, it was a $1,600 job (!), but we got the data back, and the customer, though not entirely overjoyed, was pleased.

Moral of the story? If your employees you she's sick.....let her go home!

Oh yeah.....and DriveSavers does good work.

[Mike Temporale]

My poor dad. he's had a couple crashes. The first time the drive devloped some bad sectors... And within no time at all, you couldn't even boot from it. Poor guy was just getting familiar with the computer.

Then a couple months later, he's finally got all his contacts back in, and everything is humming along great. The power supply catches fire. (no exageration here.) Now the fire wasn't anything huge, but the power supply was blackened. All the componets must have got a surge, because not one of them worked. I had to replace ever single part except the metal case. :(

Poor guy. Lost all that information a second time. So now, we got a CD burner in there and are showing him how to backup. Hopefully he stays on top of it.

[Paul]

I lost some (~200) of my vacation photos from China.
After I had returned, I installed a brand new WD 60GB drive and copied my c:\ partition over and used it as primary. Before you know it the dreaded HD crunching noise started happening. I tried running a scandisk a few times and sure enough, bad sectors. I wanted to reboot and check it again but as soon as the computer rebooted, my powersupply shot a bright spark and everything wizzed to a standstill. Unplugged everything, switched out the powersupply and ended up with a dead hard drive and CD-ROM drive.

Learned 3 lessons.
1.Don't mess with hard drives that have weird noises.
2.You can't restore files off of flash memory cards.
3.Backup Backup Backup

I think it's one of those things with the "you don't appreciate it till it's gone" mentality.

[Jonathan1]

I use to lose data. No longer. I've turned into the most anal person about data archiving and backup.

My desktop has a script that auto runs once a day at 3AM and backs up all critical files among them: *.txt, *.PDF, *.PST *.DOC, *.XLS, *.PUB, *.PPT, *.MDB, *.JPG, *.GIF, *.BMP, *.RAW, *.TIF, *.MOV, *.AVI, *.MP3, *.OGG, *.SLJ, *.TSK, *.DAT to my server. The script creates a new directory on the server labeled the month, day, year for a week. Then on Sunday another script on the server runs to delete the previous week’s backup.
My My Docs is pointing out to my home server that is RAIDED and backed up once a day on a DLT drive. One tape per week gets dropped into a fire resistant box in my basement and then once a month one set of tapes (2 total since its containing my MP3 collection as well.) goes off site to my safty dep box.
My laptop has double redundancy by backing up not only to my network, where the My Docs is point as well using Windows Offline utilities”, drive but my 1GB PCMCIA hard drive as well. (In the event of me not being home when the backup procedure takes place.

What brought this on was a total loss of everything on my computer back in 98. I mean everything. The drive up and died. I sort of took on data backup with a vengeance after that day.

At work I’m not so anal because We’ve got 150 users in there. It’s not really feasible for me to backup everyone’s info on a day to day basis. (Not without the big wigs up top shelling out a lot more for some more server drives.) However I do, do it on a quarterly basis. Same things as above with the addition being their Lotus Notes ID files, their VPN certs, and their notes *.nsf files. Time and again I warn people NOT to store any critical information on their C: drive. That is the main reason we have a file server. However there is always some user who thinks they know best and when a hard drive fails and they lose data they are all pissed. Its called listening to you IS staff dumb***. :twisted:

[gonsped]

True true. I guess most people should learn some basic computing before they get their hands on one.

I personally partition my home PC's HDD to 2 - C: and D: - all programs go to C drive and all data go to D drive. Every few weeks I backup my data on D drive to CDs.
If anything goes wrong to the programs - I just use Norton Ghost 2003 to restore the image file I had when I installed the computer fresh. So its back to new again.

Every 3 months or so I do a complete Windows install and installed the freshest drivers available and ghost that too.

It saves soooo much headaches and I am always confident my system is running strong! :)

We have 4 computers @ home so this method is very reproducible and it works! ;)

[R K]

2.You can't restore files off of flash memory cards.
3.Backup Backup Backup

Just for future references, read the article at the link below.

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/restoring-digital-photos-article.html

It covers different ways to restore data off of memory cards.

[dugn]

I'm a backup fan - and not from ever losing any data myself. I just read enough horror stories or experienced them second-hand from fellow IT folks. My personal solution for all of my MP3s, digital pix, and Music vids? A big firewire external drive. My buddy has one too.

We back up our respective home systems, then trade our external drives with each other at work once a month. Even if my house burns to the ground (or his does) - we have a backup in seperate locations at least 30 miles from each other.

Oh yeah - and to stay relevant to the thread: we had a server room meltdown at a health insurance firm I worked at in SLC, UT. The HVAC failed in a room that housed 2 NT servers I was responsible for - and 2 NetWare servers another admin was responsible for. After 18+ hours in 130 degree temperatures (in the room - no telling how hot the drives got). She spent 18 days recovering pieces of her data from a backup solution that didn't work (she never tested it). I recovered fully in two ways: yanked the drive and did a full restore (4 hrs total time) and let NT CHKDSK/Repair run on the melted drives after I inserted them into another system. Repair churned HARD on the NTFS-formatted drive for 28 hours - but recovered every byte.

Additional lessons besides backup, backup often and store it somewhere else:

1) Make sure your RESTORE works
2) In the corporate world, NTFS has saved my rump

Free advice. Take it for what you paid for it :lol:

[fbricio]

IMHO After trying for many years for the best solution for data backup (a server, Zip, CD, Jazz, CDRW, etc.) I ended up with an Apple iPOD.

I found that one of the reasons why I was not doing my backups was the time it took.

The iPOD serves as my MP3 player but it is also a 20Gb Firewire (fast!!!!) hard drive that can be MAC and/or PC compatible.

I use it with my Sony Vaio and with the speed of firewire, I can backu up as frequently as I want and they take just a few minutes to be completed.