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View Full Version : Win 1 of 10 Seagate 1TB FreeAgent Desk + Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB Drive Bundles


Jason Dunn
12-02-2008, 01:09 PM
<p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1228217886.usr1.jpg" /></p><p>Data loss is brutal to deal with. Regular Digital Home Thoughts readers know that I bring up the issue of data backup regularly, because sadly most people don't take data backups seriously until they've lost something they cared about (I know I was the same way). The folks at <a href="http://www.seagate.com" target="_blank">Seagate</a>, in conjunction with <a href="http://www.notebooks.com" target="_blank">Notebooks.com</a> and nine other Web sites, would like to give one lucky winner a head start on changing their backup habits by giving them a <a href="http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/Free-Agent.html" target="_blank">Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB portable drive</a>, and a monstrous <a href="http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/Free-Agent.html" target="_blank">1TB FreeAgent Desk</a> drive. For those of you not so good at the mathematics, that's 1500 GB of storage space, all at blazing USB 2.0 speeds. What's not to love?</p><p>Want to win this hard drive prize package? All you have to do is answer the following question: What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened? Post your reply in this discussion thread, one comment per person. The winner will be chosen randomly from all the posted comments. Your deadline for submitting your comment is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on December the 6th. The winner will be announced on Monday the 8th.</p><p>Interested in increasing your chances of winning? Stop by each of these other nine great sites and enter their contests as well:</p><p><span> <ul><li><a href="http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/click.php?l=http://www.crunchgear.com/">CrunchGear</a></li><li><a href="http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/click.php?l=http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/">Bleeping Computer</a></li><li><a href="http://www.gottabemobile.com/2008/11/26/gbm-contest-win-one-of-ten-seagate-freeagent-1tb-500gb-drive-bundles/" target="_blank">Gotta Be Mobile</a></li><li><a href="http://www.notebooks.com/2008/11/26/giveaway-seagate-hard-drives/">Notebooks.com</a></li><li><a href="http://www.geekstogo.com/2008/11/29/contest-seagate-freeagent-backup-hard-dr ive-bundles/ " target="_blank">GeeksToGo</a></li><li><a href="http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/click.php?l=http://www.planetamd64.com/">PlanetAMD64.com</a></li><li><a href="http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/black-friday-giveaway-contest-seagate-freeagent-1tb-500gb-hard-drive/" target="_blank">Gadgetell</a></li><li><a href="http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/11/27/holiday-giveaway-15tb-of-seagate-drives" target="_blank">Paulstamatiou.com</a></li><li><a href="http://macenstein.com/default/archives/1823">Macenstein.com</a></li><li><a href="http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic182325.html" target="_blank">Bleeping Computer</a></li></ul></span><strong>UPDATE: </strong>...and the winner of this contest is...<em><strong>Heatwave316</strong></em>! Thanks to everyone for entering - it was great to see 160 entries for this contest, although it was hard to read about some data loss stories - I feel your pain, I know what it's like. For the 159 of you who didn't win, and to everyone else reading this, I'd really encourage you to back up your data if you're not already doing so. An external USB hard drive is a great way to start, but automatic online backups are an even more economical way to back up your data and they have the added protection of being off site - that local hard drive sitting next to your computer? Fire, flood, theft, or any number of other things will take that hard drive out if it takes your computer out. My personal choice for online backups is <a href="http://www.mozy.com/?ref=3f9a896b&amp;kbid=30184&amp;m=4&amp;i=75" target="_blank">Mozy</a> [Affiliate], and they just so happen to have a 10% discount coupon this month. The coupon code is <strong>DECEMBER</strong>. I'm currently backing up just over 180 GB of data with Mozy (yeah, it took a while to upload) and all my restore tests have worked quite well. Give it a try!</p>

egads
12-02-2008, 01:51 PM
I'd backup my work data. Never hurts to have an extra copy of your work laying around!

Stinger
12-02-2008, 02:10 PM
Yay, another awesome Thoughts competition!

The main two things I back up are my media and photos. It would be a pain but I could re-rip my CD/DVDs. However, if I lost my photos I would be devastated. So many memories.

Dyvim
12-02-2008, 02:15 PM
Work data, documents, photos, music, video- pretty much everything on my notebook.

I lost over 100 GB of music last year when my external HD crashed (and I still haven't finished the task of re-ripping all that music from CD), and now I keep my digital media on 2 NAS drives. But I can always use more storage as those NAS drives are filling up.

jaxim
12-02-2008, 02:47 PM
I just bought a HD camcorder (Canon HF100). I bought it because I just became a new daddy and wanted to capture every waking moment of my daughter (in glorious high definition of course ;-)

I'm currently storing the video files on my hard drive but I have no way of backing up the files because my backup media is too small, so I need a drive like this Seagate drive to store all these memories. I'd be devestated if any of these video files were lost, especially the first video of my daughter, the video of her birth.

alese
12-02-2008, 02:48 PM
I have quite a lot of work stuff on my Notebook and I really wouldn't like to loose that, but the two most important things are my pictures at home and my PIM data at work on Exchange.

I would be devastated if I'd loose pictures, so I keep them on my two 500GB drives connected into RAID1 and additionally on another external drive, as for PIM data with all my contacts and phone numbers - I would be lost without it, but Exchange is well backed up and also have backup of PIM data on my phone...

As for loosing data - I was rather fortunate until now - I lost some things here and there over the years but nothing I couldn't replace or rebuild...

Sfrick
12-02-2008, 02:53 PM
I had a great back up plan until the drive died. I sure would like to bring a new friend home.

jrmfzf
12-02-2008, 02:54 PM
My biggest concern would be photos. I have thousands of them from over the years and both me and my wife would be devastated if we lost them. On top of that, my wife is pregnant and expecting in June, so I know at that time the camera is going to be snapping constantly and I'll probably start using my camcorder a lot more. Too many memories to leave it to chance.

gstenger
12-02-2008, 02:58 PM
As a web developer, I run the development version of my web application on my laptop. Although changes are pushed out fairly regularly to the staging environment, it would be really bad to lose even a day's worth of work. It would great to never have to worry about running out of free space on my backup drive!

BMWlover318
12-02-2008, 03:00 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?

I would be devastated if I lost all my music. It would take months to reload my CDs back onto a hard drive.

Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

I have not lost important data permanently, but I have had old backup hard drives crash.

Bruce76
12-02-2008, 03:03 PM
Ya, Photos and Health records would be high on my list

Bruce

BMWlover318
12-02-2008, 03:04 PM
I would hate to lose all my music. Fortunately, I have not completely lost data due to a hard drive crash, but I've lost backups.

uzziah0
12-02-2008, 03:26 PM
My biggest losses would be digital photos. I also have a bunch of home movies, and I think one is on my external HD, but they are all still on tape from the recorder.

I have most of the pictures backed up on CD, and some on-line.

The biggest problem is my external HD is making funny sounds. I am working to copy everything somewhere so I can reformat it, but I've run out of room.
I have to copy stuff to DVD now, but hopefully it will be OK.

DHT, thanks for the fun contest.
There aren't too many posts here, seems like most are about pictures and video.

Cold Flame
12-02-2008, 03:31 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

Without question I would be most upset to lose my digital photos. I'd be upset to lose my music/videos that I have saved on my PC as well, but nearly as much as my photos. I try to back them up semi-regularly, but it would be nice to have a permanent solution in place that was hidden in my furnace room somewhere that I could set and basically forget.

I'm not sure I could forgive myself if I was to ever have a catastrophic failure and lose all of the photos of my daughter, family, etc... Thusfar I've been fortunate and haven't lost anything! (fingers and toes crossed)

David Horn
12-02-2008, 03:31 PM
I'd hate to lose my photo collection. I can be a bit slack about backups and learnt my lesson when my laptop got stolen a year or so ago and I lost a few month's worth. Not going to let that happen again!

srsabu
12-02-2008, 03:40 PM
The thing I would miss most is the photos and videos of my kids. I also keep copies of them on my server, and back them up offsite.

I've been lucky to never have lost anything important. My wife had a drive crash and lost a bunch of her school assignments and some music.

The Yaz
12-02-2008, 03:48 PM
Besides my photos I have an Access database that has my miniature collection itemized with details and photos. I don't think I could ever recreate all of that data now that I'm married and have kids...

:)

wardseward
12-02-2008, 03:51 PM
Family photos. That, by far, would be the worst thing I could lose.

AximMarkSD
12-02-2008, 04:02 PM
Agreed. Losing the thousands of photos would be devastating.

toohotfortur
12-02-2008, 04:06 PM
I have never lost anything yet. I would be most upset if I lost my family photographs. I have no hard copy with which to back them up again.

Neil Enns
12-02-2008, 04:21 PM
Photos of my dog!

BugDude10
12-02-2008, 04:33 PM
Since I back up my work data at work, the most important stuff for me to back up at home would be my photos and my videos & video projects. (I try to back everything up on discs, but it still just feels safer to have everything on a hard drive. Like, I don't know, a brand new Seagate FreeAgent drive!)

Joel Crane
12-02-2008, 04:47 PM
All my music, movies and photos! I'd be devastated if I lost my hand organized mp3 collection.

I've never lost anything, I've had lots of hard drives fail but they always turn out to be my "experimental linux drive" or something like that.

z2z
12-02-2008, 04:50 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

I can't bear to lose all my documents and photos from over the years. I have lost an old harddrive before and I lost all my old data from that time. Now I try to make a backup once in a while using cds.

marvi1
12-02-2008, 04:58 PM
Photos and (wait for it) Income Tax data. And yes, I lost my tax data one year before I had a chance to print a copy for my files (but AFTER I had filed). Hope I never get audited!:eek:

cfaslave
12-02-2008, 05:08 PM
Have you ever lost important data on your computer? Yep several times. Each time I said “I’ll never do that again.” And then do that again.

What happened and how do you backup your data now? I now do a monthly auto-backup using Acronis Tru-Image program but only for the essentials. I do an image of my OS drive always as well as a few of my very important ones. Others I just live on the edge ;)

Merlin_AZ
12-02-2008, 05:20 PM
Probably the most important irreplaceable items would be pictures.

leslietroyer
12-02-2008, 05:27 PM
I use WHS for backup - seems to work just fine, I've tested it and am happy with the speed and ease of restores.

I would be most "hurt" if I lost my music library.

The biggest impact for me loosing data - was the loss of my issis boot disk -- now where oh where did I put that 8" floppy???

LEs

ryanmorris
12-02-2008, 05:33 PM
Order of importance, least to most: 4) personal files, budgets, lists; 3) 7,000 audio files (*legally* ripped from hundreds of CDs); 2) address lists of family & friends; 1) thousands of family photos

copperdog
12-02-2008, 05:58 PM
I've lost work files before, because of drive crashes. And, while that has caused me to lose hours & days, recreating that work, that would be nothing compared to the thought of losing the thousands of personal photos, and the videos of me with my wife and 2 year old daughter.

Because I have a rare genetic disorder, there is a very real possibility that there is a limited time my daughter & I have together. I would be devastated if she did not have those memories, as she grows older, due to a technical difficulty, or lack of foresight.

timmy
12-02-2008, 06:49 PM
Likea many others I fear loss of my photos, but also my whole contact list which resides in Outlook.

I have been pretty consistent backing up to CD / DVD before, so I haven't really lost a lot of data (still...).

rudedog71
12-02-2008, 07:35 PM
Same here...I could deal with losing my music but my wife would KILL me if I lost all 8 years of family photos since our kids were born.

kcwester
12-02-2008, 08:09 PM
The absolute worst thing for me to lose would be my digital pictures. I have pictures that I could never replace and, as a person guilty of not backing up, know the importance of this.

I have three children and have taken non stop pictures of all of them and definitely could use this to protect my pictures.

canux
12-02-2008, 08:50 PM
Digital photos and home movies, along with our personal files. We use SugarSync for personal and work files and Zenfolio for digital photos, but also do an external hard drive for photos, although 160GB ain't enough anymore!

wb1212
12-02-2008, 09:03 PM
The worst loss that I could experience would absolutely be my digital pics. I have an old IDE HD in an external case that I use to back them up, but it is really getting close to full capacity.

OKCrew
12-02-2008, 09:39 PM
Of course, unique data like my photos is the most devastating to lose. Luckily I have yet to loose any data on a hard drive. I have lost an SD card with some important info though. Had to go back a month in a copy of it I backed up.

spoirier
12-02-2008, 09:49 PM
Lost music and photos would not be good.

dtanderson
12-02-2008, 10:17 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?

My photos

Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

I have not lost any important data. I usually back it up to CD/DVD but my data is getting to big for DVDs now and I need something bigger. This bundle would be great for backing up my data.

Bob Christensen
12-02-2008, 10:17 PM
I'd hate to loss my photos and my financial data (MS Money). I do have a backup routine, but it's not frequent enough--the prize would be awesome!
I've never lost anything critical in 26 years of PC computing (but I have "misplaced" some stuff!).

CrimsnDragn
12-02-2008, 10:52 PM
file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Owner/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpgfile:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Owner/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpgnever lost any data before, but I have 8 years of school essays, projects, pictures that I've saved up. Would be a shame if I ever lost them.

Pony99CA
12-02-2008, 10:54 PM
I'd probably be most upset to lose photos of my daughter and my financial records.

Losing my backup data (on a Maxtor 1 TB NAS drive that no longer seems to function) wasn't fun, either, although mainly because I wasted the $300 on the drive and am no longer doing backups until I get a new drive.

Steve

cmchavez
12-02-2008, 11:29 PM
If anything happened to the digital photos on our home computer, my wife would go nuclear...and then would devastate me next. Backing up those and our personal financial data would be top priority.

Ploobers
12-03-2008, 12:39 AM
My photos - I had 55 GB of photos that had at least 100 hours of photo tagging done from a trip to Israel, Egypt and Jordan, and my hard drive crashed, leaving me with whatever my recovery software could get.

Xan
12-03-2008, 02:38 AM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?

I would be devastated if i would lose my pictures, videos, music and most essentially my personal documents..! they mean alot to me.

Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

Nothing of this sort has happened till date... but still, who wants live on the edge?.. Give me the HDDs please!!!

ddang
12-03-2008, 02:42 AM
I would be devastated if i lost the photos of memories with my friends and family. those are things you just cant go and download back. my computer crashed a few years ago so i did end up losing precious photos. i think it got messed up b/c of a virus or something.

Xan
12-03-2008, 02:47 AM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?
I would be devastated if i would lose my personal documents..then comes pictures & video,then music..

Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

nothing like this has happened before.. but who want to live on the edge.. plz gimme thse HDDS

bly23
12-03-2008, 02:58 AM
The three things I would be upset about if i lost them would be: pictures, music, and school work.
There was this one time where I thought I lost my pictures. I accidentally deleted them from my computer when I was clearing off my Zune without realizing. A few days later I went to look through my pictures and they were gone. I didn't know what to do and I was freaking out. Luckily I decided to look in the recycling bin and all of my pictures there. It took a while for my heart to stop beating so fast though.

paschott
12-03-2008, 04:24 AM
Photos - definitely the photos. We have a ton of pictures from the last 5 years and it's hard to back up that many pictures in a way that will be permanent. Event optical media doesn't seem to last a really long time anymore. Besides, we're getting to the point where it won't really fit on a DVD anymore.

Ideally, I'd love to have an external unit with mirrored drives in case one dies, but those tend to be quite a bit more expensive.

As for losing important data - back in the days of Stacker, my stac file became corrupt and I lost everything in it, including a program that was due within two days. There was no way to rewrite the whole thing in that time and I took a pretty poor grade as a result. Didn't put anything critical inside of one of those compressed drives again after that.

ctmagnus
12-03-2008, 04:34 AM
I'd be completely lost without my eWallet files.

I have lost important data a few times. I have no idea what happened - I was working along, saving every so often. I closed the file to take a break and when I came back, the file was nowhere on the hard drive.

siauw
12-03-2008, 05:09 AM
I have my personal Photo and music in my notebook. Last year I lost my hard drive and so the data, but I have some backup file in my 30GB iPod Video.

andrew_lee
12-03-2008, 05:11 AM
The worst things for me to lose are financial records and programs that I've written. I keep copies of everything important on both my desktop and laptop computers.

Over the years, I've had hard drives die a few times, but the only files I wasn't able to recover were documents and programs that I had written for classes that I had already finished.

Rob Alexander
12-03-2008, 05:59 AM
My photos as virtually every photo I've ever taken is on my computer now. Old film ones were scanned and newer digital ones, of course, are only there.

I've never had a significant data loss, but I came close once. Back when drive space was much more expensive, I kept all of my digital video files on a 200 GB Maxtor external Firewire/USB drive. I had no backup because (it seemed to me then) drives just cost too much.

One day I turned on the system and tried to get to the video files and the drive wouldn't respond. The drive was present in the system, but gave me an error whenever I tried to access it. I was really upset to have lost all that data, but I remembered something a hard drive recovery guy once told me.

He said that when they get a bad drive in that they are getting paid to recover data from, the first thing they do is give it four or five hard smacks with the heel of their palm. He said about half of the drives they get work after that long enough to simply copy the data off. I had nothing to lose so I tried it, and sure enough... the drive started working and I got my data off.

BabyJ2590
12-03-2008, 06:37 AM
The folder labeled Miscellaneous, because looking at notes, small projects, or random pictures brings back memories of particular moments in time that reading old essays, assignments, and reports never could.

Even though the Miscellaneous folder doesn't take up much space, it takes up a lot of space in my heart. I would like to backup of all my media too.

wesk
12-03-2008, 07:12 AM
I have a lot work data that I wouldn't want to lose. I do back it up but, I had my laptop stolen a couple of years ago and of course they had to take my external hard drive that I was using for my backups also. :mad: I lost 2 years of data, plus some major documentation that I had spent a lot of time on for an account.

I can always use more hard drive space, since my wife has a laptop now, with lots of pictures on it.

Wes

Milkage
12-03-2008, 10:18 AM
I lost my resume (just finished updating it, and hadn’t sent it out yet) along with a bunch of photos of my best friends wedding after a power outage fried my power supply, which then took out my hard drive. It was a little disappointing. Now, I keep all of my pictures and important documents on my hard drive as well as thumb drives. This would go a long ways toward solving the problem of trying to figure out what files are on what thumb drive. I could put it all in one place.

NYC84
12-03-2008, 01:27 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?
School documents and photos + videos

Have you ever lost important data - what happened?
Yes. I did a re-installation of windows and forgot to backup some of my photos. :(

bjctsm3
12-03-2008, 01:32 PM
my tax returns......

I lost 500Gb on a failed WD MyBook, that was my 1st HD loss.

swalker
12-03-2008, 01:51 PM
Probably my media collections as they would take some time to copy back.

No important data losses yet as everything is duplicated on multiple drives.

Gordo
12-03-2008, 01:52 PM
My desktop computer with all my Photos was recently fried by lighting. The bolt also fried my USB external hard drive backup. I was fortunate enough to be able to remove the hard drive from the computer and put it in an external housing to access the files. I need another external housed drive that I can disconnect from power after the backup is complete.

gibson042
12-03-2008, 02:19 PM
What do I have on my computer that I'd be devastated to lose? Everything. All my work, documents going back to high school, photographs and emails going back almost as far, hundreds of hours of music, plus recipes, statements, video, settings customizations, and I don't even know what else. My entire life is digital, and I'd always welcome new backup drives.

ArthurRandom
12-03-2008, 03:51 PM
My current backup plan is this:
Firstly, a prayer to merciful Minerva that nothing will ever go wrong with my laptop and that it will never get stolen or damaged, despite the amount of travelling I do.
Secondly, if anything should ever go wrong, God forbid, I would check that all my music and photos are still on A-drive, where I deposited them for free several months ago and then completely forgot about. I would, of course, lose anything added to my laptop since I uploaded them, but there you go.
Thirdly, I would root out the DVDs to which I copied the same music and photos, just in case. I'm pretty sure I backed them up properly...Once again, anything added in the past half year would be lost.

So, I think I have most of the things that I would hate to lose backed up, even if it is in a rather half-arsed fashion. Whether I still have the registration numbers for various software I'm running, I couldn't say for sure. Either way, it would be annoying to have to search out and download the relevant software that it has taken me a while to put together from various free offers. (I wonder where those registration numbers are?)

If I had a genuinely safe backup I would, for the first time in my life, do a Dell System Restore. I think I have accumulated so much trash over the years, both in the registry and everywhere else, that the thought of having my laptop back to its pristine condition is really very attractive. This time I would know how to look after it from the get-go, not like when I first got it. Until now I have never dared try a system restore, just in case something goes horribly wrong, A-Drive goes bust on the same day and my backup DVDs turn out to contain only error messages.

More than anything, having an external drive big enough to take not only a copy of the contents of my own laptop, but also perhaps a copy of my mum's and girlfriend's computers as well, would make me feel less nervous about my amateurish attempts to make either of them load in less than 20 minutes on startup.

cweeks
12-03-2008, 05:52 PM
I own a small music publishing company and all my files (including the music files themselves) are stored on an aging Seagate drive. And, no, I have not done a complete backup in... well... forever. I am getting ready to pull the trigger on an NAS, but I haven't found one I like/can afford yet.

There are 7 other composers that depend on my company... I hope I get off my butt and back everything up before it goes kablooey.

janoulle
12-03-2008, 09:54 PM
"What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened?"

I've got my work stuff (tres important) on my laptop along with my precious pictures, music and videos. I would obviously be heartbroken about losing my personal documents and sooo (possibly) fired for using my personal laptop for doing company business. I did lose important work stuff last month, but I didn't get fired because I didn't dare tell. I simply had to redo several hours worth of work that got lost.

slugbug
12-04-2008, 12:50 AM
I would be devastated if I lost my music and photo collection. I did lose data a few years ago when my one drive of my RAID0 array failed taking 100gb of irreplaceable data with it. I haven't used RAID since then.

Yair
12-04-2008, 12:52 AM
Loosing my old emails and IM history will leave me devastated, it's really a horrible thought.
Lucky for me i never had to lose any data until now and even when an old WD HD died on me, i was able to get the data out of it.

i just wish i didn't just "jinx" my luck:confused:

jerboa
12-04-2008, 03:09 AM
Irreplaceable would be the family pictures. I've already had one or two scares about losing them and do back up on a semi-regular basis. But I'm running out of room so the additional space would ensure that I can't use running out of room as an excuse.

kra9235
12-04-2008, 03:38 AM
I would devasted if I lost all my music and email archive.

MaRSFlip
12-04-2008, 04:34 AM
I’m currently writing my PhD thesis (in Developmental Biology) so loosing my experimental data (embryo pictures, microarray data, clone and vector sequences, etc) and my Word documents from my notebook would be … brutal - I actually dread even thinking about it. Loosing my music would also be bad, but not nearly as dramatic.
I have lost some data in the past, mostly due to formatting the hard drive without having backup all my data. But until now I’ve always been able to recover the most important bits. My most important loss however were some microscopy pictures that I had archived in a DVD+R which went bad - a lesson learned the hard way, I spent three weeks repeating the experiments and taking new pictures. Now I still archive older data on DVDs but always keep copies on a hard drive, which I find is much more reliable.

timtam
12-04-2008, 05:31 AM
Family pictures because they are truly irreplaceable. I have yet to lose really important data. Hope my luck holds!

adcurtin
12-04-2008, 08:51 AM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? I have family pictures, but those are all on more than one computer. I have all my schoolwork, that I have ever done since I got my own computer. Some of this is backup up, some isn't. I keep adding to it. I have all my music, but again most of that is backed up. Have you ever lost important data - what happened? I had an 80GB samsung laptop hard drive die on me suddenly. I was really lucky though, it was under warranty. I first threw it in the freezer in a ziploc bag, then waited a couple hours, then tapped it against a table. I then hooked it up to a different computer with a usb enclosure and was able to back up about half my data, then it died again and I repeated and got everything back. Samsung then sent me a new hard drive (100GB instead of 80) and I put everything back. But I got really lucky that time. Now that I think of it, in my first computer, I had a 20GB hard drive and that died and I lost some data and I couldn't get it back (hadn't learned of the freezer trick yet either).

firedog
12-04-2008, 11:34 AM
I once lost a digital photo from a place in Turkey that I'd travelled to especially to take the photo.

I managed to use recovery software to get a small low quality version of the photo back.

Thanks for another great contest.

VickieB
12-04-2008, 12:19 PM
If I lost my photos, music and personal data, it would be hard, especially the photos. I've been real lucky that I haven't lost anything important that I haven't been able to recreate.

I do have CDs with most of my stuff, but to be honest, they're not current.

forcerdj
12-04-2008, 12:56 PM
My Audio collection, i am a DJ, so losing it would be devistating, i am also taking the stupid risk of having no real backup.

mfmjos
12-04-2008, 02:10 PM
There is nothing on my notebook that would be devastating to lose. A hassle: yes, potentially expensive: yes. Fortunately, the vast majority of my data is backed up on a Windows Home Server, and further on an external USB drive for offsite storage. I have lost data not important data. Before I had my current backup solution in place I lost a hard drive, or two. Mostly, I lost music files. That wasn’t so bad, I just had to rip the CDs again.

autodafe20
12-04-2008, 02:23 PM
Photos of course, but mainly several years worth of informational files.

Heatwave316
12-04-2008, 03:12 PM
If I lost all of my pictures and music, I just don't know what I would do. That would be absoutely terrible!!!

I have been close to losing data via a notebook hard drive failure, but I was lucky that the data was recovered.

UnChat
12-04-2008, 04:48 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?

Nothing right now


Have you ever lost important data?

Yes


I recovered it myself with diagnostics or found it backed up
somewhere - what happened?


At one time digital data was hugely important to me so I simply learned to
backup, transfer to different media and to do drive recovery. I have no life ;<).

DaveYhdd
12-04-2008, 07:37 PM
Devastated if lost:
1. Digital photo memories
2. Data (bookmarks, word files, graphics, maps, all my various html pages and websites)
3. All my apps (plus their customizations)
4. My beautifully-setup mnemonic Windows Start menu
5. Windows customizations!

Have you ever lost important data:
Indeed. Yes. It was a long time ago. I don't want to talk about it. :-(mental block)

Thank you Jason Dunn for the random chance to win.

yvilla
12-04-2008, 10:23 PM
For me the only really devasting loss would be my photos too; work stuff can be recreated.

I'm lucky to not have exprerienced a loss to date; Foldershare is my main protection, but USB hard drive is my secondary level.

DNel
12-05-2008, 06:12 AM
I would be most devastated losing the years of documents I've created for work (school). I currently back them up by copying the files to 3 different computers (2 personal and 1 work) This was after losing many documents when our tech guy upgraded the work computer without giving notice. I have many photos but if they are important, I print them or burn them to DVD's. Most of my music is from CD's so all I would have to do is rip them again.

BigMac
12-05-2008, 06:22 AM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

I'm not too worried about media files, all my photos are on flickr, I don't have many videos, and the music is stored in my mp3 player. But I would be absolutely devastated if I lost all of my genealogy research data...I've put in a lot of time and effort into that hobby and losing ANY of it would be tough to take.

I did recently lose my usb flash drive. I carried it with me everywhere and it used to hold all my email via Thunderbird (ported to Gmail before the incident), passwords via Roboform, chat logs, dozens of portable apps, and lots of documents. I actually lost it by destruction really. It was attached to my laptop and the laptop fell flash drive first into the ground, breaking it in half. :(

tuxplorer
12-05-2008, 06:28 AM
I would like to win this because I'm most concerned about my huge collection of application software I've collected since the 1990s, software which you can no longer get anywhere on the internet, rareware which still does its job where modern apps fail, and other software I've collected for nostalgia's sake. :)

Chrhsher
12-05-2008, 06:53 AM
Mine has all my pictures from graduation and of my 6 week trip to Japan over the summer, which I don’t think I would be able to replace if they were lost. The only data I’ve ever lost that mattered to me was my college application essays. They mysteriously disappeared from my computer about a month before they needed to be submitted…needless to say I spent quite a few weeks very grumpy from lack of sleep…

Lanzaa
12-05-2008, 07:03 AM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened?

I would be devastated if i lost the pictures of me and my girlfriend. The last time i lost important data was a school report i had been working on for 3 weeks. Two days before the project was due I tried to boot my computer and the hard drive crashed.

greeeneyedwh
12-05-2008, 07:11 AM
I have been writing a book......

for about 6 years now.......

NONE of it is backed up in anyway

I am ashamed

.....but not too ashamed to admit it; I'd, needless to say, love to win

Thanks:)

shan79
12-05-2008, 08:41 AM
>> What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost?

As a lecturer of finance, the most important data for me are the lecture slides, problem sets, quiz questions and their solutions, grades of my former students (in case they request me for a recommendation later). Equally critical for me are video recordings of lectures offered both by me and the faculty that I invite for guest lectures. Losing these will definitely kill me. While losing the many sweet memories lying in my HD in the form of images and videos will break my heart, they won't kill me.

My current backup plan is a decentralized piece-meal approach. My lecture slides, problem sets and gradesheets are archived at the end of every course and mailed to my gmail account (and labeled appropriately for quick retrieval). Since uploading video lectures takes time (plus, webstorage isn't cheap!) and since they occupy too much of my precious disk space, I just cut CDs and hope that they don't get scratched from multiple readings. The critical personal data are encrypted and stored along with the current course materials in my 4GB Sandisk pendrive.

>> Have you ever lost important data- what happened?

While at college, our department let us download recorded lectures. I faithfully saved them in my HD, assuming it would be useful someday. Owing to an unexpected harddisk crash, I lost every single file. Though it broke my heart, it didn't kill me as I still hadn't entered the teaching profession. Years later, when I started out as a lecturer, I realized how much of a difference it would have made to my teaching if I had those original lectures with me.

Dree
12-05-2008, 08:44 AM
I lost just about everything. Fortunately all of the pictures that I scanned were saved to a tiny usb device. I need something like this to backup everything.

LindaA
12-05-2008, 08:52 AM
I am a writer so all of my research, articles, and so forth is on my computer. My hard drive is getting too full so I am going to have to do something soon or it will crash.

saoder
12-05-2008, 09:58 AM
I've lost a boatload of mp3s and had to re-rip them. that was not fun

coupongirl
12-05-2008, 10:53 AM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost? Have you ever lost important data - what happened?



I am a journalist, so if I lost my word documents, it would be a disaster!

Sadly, I have lost important data. I had a hard drive that was failing, so I bought a new drive, and successfully transferred all of my data. But in a cruel twist of fate, the brand new hard drive which I had purchased was corrupt, and it immediately crashed and took my data with it. My significant other is skilled at recovering corrupted, chewed-up data, but some of it was just beyond salvage.

Thank you so much for this generous giveaway! I would be so thrilled if I won. I am actually in the market to buy a drive just like this anyway, because my backup system is woefully inadequate. So it would be amazing to win something that I really need! Thank you for the chance!

azdave58
12-05-2008, 11:21 AM
My Documents

ipodtouchfan
12-05-2008, 11:49 AM
I would be totally gutted if I lost everything! I have a really bad backup method at the moment, I back everything up to DVD but I just have so much stuff that I'm losing track of whats backed up and whats not backed up! I have already lost a whole heap of file when my internal HDD decided to pack a sad and stopped working. I lost an ENTIRE research project for assessment! 3 months work gone, just like that! I did have fragments of it on the DVDs though but that was SOO time consuming to recover and I had done the majority of the work the night before it crapped out. :( So external storage would be the answer but I'm too poor to buy and external HDD since I'm a hard-up student. Winning this would change my life! AND my backup system for sure! Please let me win!:D:D:D:D

skalobster11
12-05-2008, 11:53 AM
I'd hate to lose my pictures and music...I haven't lost anything yet...thankfully!

onourown4
12-05-2008, 12:56 PM
yep, I learned my lesson the hard way - I lost all my ebooks and the reviews I've written over the past 3 years. I review for a book website and had everything (and I do mean everything on the external hard drive - it crashed. Unfortunately I didn't have them on the regular computer (I was 'saving space' - for what I don't know!) Anyway, we now save to the computer and send a copy of everything to an online email for ourselves. Need to get another external hard drive but won't be storing everything in any one place ever again!

satergang
12-05-2008, 02:39 PM
The two most important things I would back up are my precious photos, even some of my parent's golden anniversary and important letters and documents I have saved. We have had a computer crash before and luckily we were able to retrieve most everything, but it's too scary to risk anymore.

tawnda
12-05-2008, 03:35 PM
I use my computer for nearly everything... Well, my hubby went to install new SATA drives on my comp so I backed up all my files on another drive and he went to work. Problem was he was a wee bit tired and my comp didn't recognize the new drives so when he went to format & install windows, the new drives weren't there but my other drive was... so it got formatted... I lost EVERYTHING
Lesson learned... never leave your backup drive connected when you are planning on wiping a drive...

sfpx
12-05-2008, 04:30 PM
I would be devastated if I would lose the source code of my software projects.
I usually do backups on DVD but it's far from being as effective as an HD.

I once lost the code of one of my software project and it was quite a painful adventure to recode it all from scratch.

samsakara
12-05-2008, 04:57 PM
I have no way to back up my stuff and would love this. I'm so afraid I would loose all my family pictures that are store on my computer. That is very important to me to keep those pictures safe and far more important then anything else on my computer.

Purplemommi
12-05-2008, 05:29 PM
I would be devastated if I lost my pictures. Most are irreplaceable.

DePro
12-05-2008, 06:19 PM
I've never lost any data that I've not been able to retrieve, but I would hate to lose my digital photos and my music.

tiffie555
12-05-2008, 06:20 PM
my baby's pictures and years of work -- would be depressed. Haven't lost anything yet but playing with fire. Fingers crossed for this lifesaver!

ksbald2
12-05-2008, 06:45 PM
I have worked on my family tree for several years and have research that I was alomost impossible to retrieve. I have 3 years of work that I have done for my education. Some of which are multi page papers that I need for graduate school. I also keep alot of pictures and music.
I think I would be devestated if I lost the family tree information. Compiling that information takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. The school work would be hard too because I would have to redo a lot of research. The pictures are memories that cannot be replaced. I would simply cry....

sonyasparks
12-05-2008, 07:05 PM
I would hate to lose my photos. Thanks for the chance.

weller1975
12-05-2008, 07:25 PM
I would be devastated if I lost my pictures, I have every digital picture of my daughter taken since she was born saved on my hard drive.

xparker
12-05-2008, 07:36 PM
The thing that would suck the most to lose is my music. I have a ton of songs that if they were deleted I would neveer be able to fully restore them all.
I (myself) wouldn’t care if I lost my pictures because I don’t have any. My family would and well.. read on.


A little less than a month ago, my hard drive failed. We went everywhere looking for a fix, My family was willing to fork out hundreds of dollars to get it fixed. We had so much data on their. 5 years of pictures, all gone. 40,000 songs, all gone. School work from 4 people, wiped out. It was terrible, every picture that we took on a digital camera that didnt get printed (which is a lot) were all gone. We lost everything on that computer that we had for about 5 years. It was the worst thing that could happen, the hard drive is impossible to fix, everything is gone.

We don’t have an external hard drive. So I desperately need one for my family of 6. Another crash and we are 100% screwed. My brother is on his 4th year of college and has some massive projects stored on here.

bennigancat
12-05-2008, 08:17 PM
I would be devistated if I lost my daughter's baby pictures. One I lost a research paper for my final master's class.

duthlor
12-05-2008, 08:40 PM
i simply use my hard drive everwhere i go and now its dead i have no computer and all my games and adio are on the drive its my life

blueviolet
12-05-2008, 08:44 PM
It would completely break my heart if I lost my family photos. I would totally cry and probably for a long time.

I've lost everything on my hard drive once before but at that time, I wasn't doing digital photos so it didn't matter to me AS much as it would now.

andrius
12-05-2008, 09:15 PM
What do you have on your notebook or desktop computer that you'd be devastated if you lost?Pictures of course - they cannot be recreated :/ Also I would highly regret losing source files of my previous projects (design and coding).
Have you ever lost important data - what happened?One time my main hard drive crashed and I lost all studies information and music - however it was rather long ago - now my collection is much bigger.

jedibugs
12-05-2008, 09:39 PM
i would be totally devastated if I lost all the footage from my various video projects. Luckily, I've always had a data backup, so I've never lost anything vital before, but I am not totally without backup options, so these drives would be SUPER awesome!

happishopr
12-05-2008, 09:48 PM
What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? MY FAMILY PHOTOS & MUSIC<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
Have you ever lost important data- what happened? NOT SO FAR<o:p></o:p>

cjnedrow
12-05-2008, 10:52 PM
I have thousands of pictures from my travels on my laptop that I would be devastated to loose!
[email protected]

vranab
12-05-2008, 11:07 PM
I once lost my work e-mail database. Worst headache ever. Would hate to lose my pictures, home finances, etc.

happishopr
12-05-2008, 11:22 PM
What do you have on your notebook that you’d be devastated if you lost? MY FAMILY PHOTOS & MUSIC<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
Have you ever lost important data- what happened? NOT SO FAR<o:p></o:p>

jnkrim
12-05-2008, 11:29 PM
I would love to win to back up my movies and photos! I had a crash last year that wiped out everything I had saved except my photos as those were on a different drive.

Ivan
12-05-2008, 11:29 PM
I'd be devastated if I lost the pictures of my kids. I have uploaded some to Snapfish, but Snapfish downgrades the quality of uploads for faster transfer speed.

I have been meaning to get an external drive for some time, but was waiting on a good deal. Would be great if I win this.

chromiumman
12-05-2008, 11:53 PM
i have lots of photos that i'd be crushed if i lost.

thankfully i havn't had any serious problems. yet.

thecarol
12-06-2008, 12:21 AM
I would be devastated if I lost my music and my photos. Thankfully, I have never gone through that.

ewalsh
12-06-2008, 12:55 AM
My music is the one thing that I would really be devastated about losing. All 798 songs. These were almost all purchased digitally so it's not like I have backup.

I've been really lucky that I've never had a data loss, because I am woefully unprepared.

vranaj
12-06-2008, 03:23 AM
I have never lost important data (knock on wood). I'd hate to lose the pictures and financial info on my hard drive.

idahomom
12-06-2008, 03:47 AM
I recently started a bookkeeping business from my house and I really need to be backing up my client's data. HELP ME PLEASE!!

UnknownCity
12-06-2008, 06:36 AM
I'd be pretty devastated if I lost my old 'zine archive. They were my first awkward steps at self-publishing, and I created them in the old Microsoft Picture It! Publishing suite from, like, 2001. There are hard-copies of some of those things floating around, I guess, but I SLAVED over those files. I mean, have you ever tried to trick a cheap greeting-card program into acting like a layout engine for an 80-page fanzine? All the crashes, the slow-loading images, the tiny tweaks to offset the WYSIWYG sandbox was really "what you see may be what you get, unless Publish It decides to scramble the layout when you try to print it."

smrtim
12-06-2008, 06:44 AM
i would be devastated if i lost my photos i keep on my pc, and some work related correspondence and some personal information too.

nesta67
12-06-2008, 07:31 AM
I would be devastated if I lost all of my pictures. So far I have been lucky, but I know I need to get a better solution in place!

JD_Denver
12-06-2008, 07:50 AM
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CHP_ADM%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> I use my laptop to take minutes for several nonprofit Boards I serve on. Losing those minutes would be devastating, so I immediately copy them to a flash drive after a meeting finishes, then transfer the files from there to my desktop computer at home. Yes, I’ve lost files before, usually when a hard drive crashed, but the most recent instance was a bad OS patch, and my latest backup to an external HD was bad. I recovered some of my files from an earlier backup, but lost a lot of historical copies of content from websites I had built, and a lot of word processing documents.


On my desktop, I have lots of music and photos. It would be very time-consuming to go through the process of ripping my CDs again, but the pictures couldn't be replaced. That's why I currently use Goodsync to copy them to an external hard drive, but I don't have enough space for it all on one drive.
<o:p></o:p>

jayfr
12-06-2008, 08:46 AM
I'd be most devastated to lose my music. It took literally weeks to rip everything, and I've rekeyed the metadata for a lot of it twice now. That's because, yes, I lost my drive. I had all my music on a homebuilt external hard drive that decided to go south one day. Luckily, most of my music was retrievable from my Dell DJ.

luvmymate
12-06-2008, 08:46 AM
Loosing my family photos would be devastating. I am fortunate not to have any devastating losses to date. :)

nursiev
12-06-2008, 09:16 AM
Yes, unfortunately about a month ago I lost ALL of our family pictures and ALL of the graphics I have made for my business in the last ten years. Devastation is the only way to describe what I feel. The real tragedy is that I have a little back-up hard drive AND a 4 gig jump stick and had everything backed up on those. The little hard drive died on the same day as my laptop (no virus, just old age and natural causes I think)and the jump stick has disappeared into the abyss. Very sad. Needless to say, I know so well the value of back of my data and don’t ever want to do it again! Right now on my computer, I have a few of our family pics that I have been able to get from my blog as well as a few graphics. The most important info I have right now though is my first novel that I have been slaving away at–there’s no way I want to lose that. If I win this little beauty I'll be able to sleep much better at night!

brianpiero
12-06-2008, 10:29 AM
Thanks for the giveaway…Luckily I have never had a major “incident” losing any important data (mostly old b&w family photos scanned in) on the various Macs I’ve owned over the years, but as I start to collect more family photos, important docs, etc., I realize that my current backup solution of burning onto CD/DVD’s is not very efficient…I guess I’ll be shopping around for an external hard drive in the near future, it's time to join the 21st Century.

vranar
12-06-2008, 12:16 PM
I'd hate to lose all my school work, music, finances, etc. I once lost a paper on a thumb drive, but found a recent copy on my hard disk.

bhjustice
12-06-2008, 12:51 PM
I would hate to lose the pictures of my grandchildren. I backup everything, at least once a week so this should not happen. I keep backups of photos on cd's. This backup drive would be such a blessing.

mcjugga
12-06-2008, 04:09 PM
Well I have lots of family pictures, home videos, hundreds of movies, music and some other junk.

Here is a story of what I lost:

I am in grade 12 at the moment and just recently, I was working on a really big project at school. We have to make a fake newspaper with a group of three friends, around 5-10 articles each. After many days of gruesome work, I finished. I had a total of 8 articles (1-3 pages each article) and dozens of pictures drawn, photoshopped and found.
I call my friends and we decide to meet at one of their homes.
So I put all of my work onto my very old, somewhat glitchy portable hard drive. Now, this wouldn't have been any risk whatsoever had I copied my documents onto it. However, when I selected all of the files to copy them, I must have slipped or missed and hit CTRL-X, rather than CTRL-C.

Little did I know, all of my hard work was on that hard drive and nowhere else. So I go to my friends house, plug in my HDD and guess what happened. Absolutely nothing.

Imagine my frustration, one day until the due date and over one weeks worth of pages upon pages of writing is gone. Well, at that moment I wasn't exactly frustrated, considering I thought that it was still on my PC.

This is getting sort of long so I will finish up quickly.

I went home, looked for the documents and saw nothing.
It is getting really late so I figure I will just tell my teacher what happened.
Anyways, he says something like, "Yeah, like I am going to believe that." It is understandable, I wouldn't believe it either.
So I failed, my friends' marks, however were not affected.

Well I learned 3 lessons from this.
Do not wait until the last minute for something that requires that much work.
Make more backups!
Remove the 'x' button from my keyboard so this can't happen again.

Oh yeah, I also had hundreds of pictures and home videos were on there, but almost 80% of them were on my PC.


I hope you enjoyed hearing about my loss.

jamesH
12-06-2008, 05:22 PM
While I have been fortunate, so far, not to lose any important data due to my relatively pedestrian backup strategy I do have 4 children whom I throughly enjoy taking pictures of. And while I have backed up most of the pictures off of my laptop, I have quickly run out of space. And as you can imagine, with four kids there are a lot of other household necessities that come before buying another external hard drive. So this would come as a most welcome addition into my household.

meyerg726
12-06-2008, 06:09 PM
I keep my financial data on my notebook to keep the rest of the family in the dark. Good thing lately.

I use a spare hardrive to backup. A manual process but effective

jellosheriff
12-06-2008, 06:12 PM
My most precious are my photos, followed by email and favorites.
I lost my entire email account once including addresses. It was a nightmare.

keeponwinnin
12-06-2008, 06:16 PM
I would be devastated if I lost my music and pictures. Earlier this year I had an external hard drive and it sat upright in a little "cradle" and the cat knocked it over. I lost so many pictures.

tnshadylady
12-06-2008, 06:49 PM
I'm a writer and I have years' worth of manuscripts in progress as well as research materials from sources no longer available. My current "backup" plan is to email critical files to myself to a web based email account. This is clumsy and certainly no guarantee of safety, as I well know after losing irreplaceable files like this when a web email provider closed its doors unexpectedly. But it's the only plan I have until I can implement an off-the-computer backup system. Winning this would definitely solve that problem! I really really need this!!

vranal
12-06-2008, 08:49 PM
I'd be upset if I lost my school work, my writing, music, pictures, etc. Fortunately, I've never lost anything. I back up to an external hard drive daily.

Tangentjude
12-06-2008, 09:06 PM
I have 2 years and thousands of dollars worth of music downloads on my notebook and I would be devastated if I lost it. Not to mention it would cost me thousands more dollars to replace them.

I had a home built 4 years ago and I was lucky enough to watch it transform for a piece of land to a beautiful home. I had taken pictures every weekend for almost 6 months and saved them on my notebook. My harddrive went out on my notebook 2 years ago and not only did I lose 5 years worth of work data (reports, videos, etc) I lost all the pictures I had take of my home. I was never able to recover any of my data.

I back up daily now and a new Seagate 1TB FreeAgent Go and 500GB Drive Bundle would sure come in handy.

samanthapayn
12-06-2008, 09:18 PM
if i ever lost all the family pics i’d be woe begotten, it would be terrible. I’ve never lost any data, but i did have to back up my whole computer onto disks when it went in to be fixed, i’ m glad i did though because they ended up just giving me a new computer (for no extra fee, just $100 to renew the insurance contract)! thank god for HP insurance!

harmonden
12-06-2008, 09:30 PM
It would be tragic if I lost the dozens and dozens of stories & plays my daughter has written on the computer. She says all the importatn stuff is copied onto cds, but I don't know which ones, there is just a stack of unlabled cds sitting there. One time our computer crashed and we got it fixed, but there are some photos that are still there, but I can't click on them. That is just as bad as losing them, I guess.

Noggy
12-06-2008, 10:11 PM
Wishing I would have had a Seagate FreeAgent about a week ago when my son decided to restore his laptop to factory settings...without having backed up his system. Hundreds...I mean hundreds...of photos, music and one of a kind designs from his home business lost. I mean gone! Zip! Zero! Nada!

I would love to win one of these Seagates to back up my own personal favorites now that I've seen the devastation up close and personal that losing data can cause.

ladyt64
12-06-2008, 10:41 PM
I would be devastated if I lost my music. I have had my hard drive crash before because I didn't have any back up and it took forever and a day to replace everything.

fangirl
12-06-2008, 10:47 PM
Like most people we use our digital camera and video camera constantly. We copy the images on to our computer and rarely print them out. If my computer crashed I run the danger of losing all of our family photos.

Luckily, thus far I haven't lost any significan files.

Hipster60
12-06-2008, 10:49 PM
Hey...I'm dead if my puter crashes and totally disabled since 1992. That's why I don't have a backup...I can't afford one. Everything I have...pics, notes, letters, files, etc...are all my main HD. I really need this new backup drive...one I would give to my church...Countryside Community Church here in the Beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota.

We just had our 9th grandchild last year and all our photos would be lost if my HD crashed. My wife would absolutely kill me! With God's help maybe I'll win.

Yours in Christ, friendship and LOVE...

Hipster

phelim
12-07-2008, 12:11 AM
I'd be absolutely devastated if I lost my music. All of my photos I have on the internet, but my music library, some of which is music I've made, could never be replaced fully.

fpellerito
12-07-2008, 12:34 AM
I have my entire doctorasl dissertation on my hard drive and would have have to do a lemmings/cliff thing if I lost my data!:confused:

mikepaul
12-07-2008, 12:58 AM
I have old emails that it'd be bad to lose.

I try to maintain good backups but new drives to do it with would be nice...

jenn10
12-07-2008, 01:08 AM
My photos and my music are two huge things that I would hate to lose. Earlier this year I actually did have the harddrive on my desktop go bad and I permanently lost a lot of things including photos that I will never be able to replace. I would love to have a reliable back-up storage solution! Thank you so much for the contest.

AICORP
12-07-2008, 01:13 AM
If my notebook was to fail my most devastating loss would be the copies of customized databases that I've developed for clients. Like almost everybody I have lost data. The worst case was during a disk optimization process when our building suffered a complete power failure. The disk was fried. We had some backups but they weren't current so we lost both data and the disk drive.

edku
12-07-2008, 01:49 AM
I have photos that I would hate do lose. It actually happened to me before when my HDD required reformating and I left one folder with photos not backed up during quick DVD burning.

flared0ne
12-07-2008, 02:19 AM
Wedding pictures, adoption scrapbook, birth announcements, family pictures, ALL the panoply of documents, homework, labs, class schedules, etc associated with my recent BsEE, all the bits and pieces of my family's daily lives -- in a cascade of "handed down from system to system" over the years...

Haven't lost any significant chunk of data (yet) but very aware of the possibility -- we have several systems, NONE with much excess available storage, but I still periodically compress and prune, then backup our main system across the LAN, where ever it will fit. And anything that my wife tells me would be pertinent to MY survival, THAT gets backed up onto DVD and either goes offsite or into the fire safe...

1.5 terabytes would be AWEsome!!

Taminar
12-07-2008, 03:35 AM
My family photos, especially the ones that have been retouched and the ones that only exist in digital form.

The files from the movie I made last year.

All the graphic designs that I've done for work and have copies of on my hard drive for portfolio purposes.

Silvermoon12
12-07-2008, 03:44 AM
I would be devastated if I lost all my pictures and movies of my daughters growing up. So far I have not lost any of them.

choochoo428
12-07-2008, 04:35 AM
I'm a writer of various things (just for myself), so I'd hate it if I lost the writings. Also, there are pictures that I just love and would probably blubber for days if I lost them.
I recently lost a ton of reunion information and had to retype just about everything.

LC214
12-07-2008, 04:37 AM
Photos, Music, Work Documents, Saved Passwords/Favorites.

willitara
12-07-2008, 04:58 AM
I don't keep a lot of irreplaceable info on my hard drive but it would be time consuming to locate and reorganize my photos. My financial information would be more difficult so that would be my first priority for back up.

rtrexel
12-07-2008, 05:37 AM
I would be devastated to lose the work that I do. It is all done on computer and it would take a lot of time to get it back and some couldn't even be retrieved. It would have to be redone. Thanks for the chance to win.

donnak4
12-07-2008, 06:08 AM
I wouldn't want to lose my taxes. Thankfully, I haven't had any significant losses, but I need a good backup system.

slehan
12-07-2008, 06:52 AM
I don't have a regular backup. I have some of my photos on a DVD and some files on a jump drive but this prize would be a lifesaver. Thanks for the contest.

lilyk
12-07-2008, 08:40 AM
I have pictures and email that I would be devastated if lost them. I have lost important data previously when my old computer wouldn't boot up anymore.

Jason Dunn
12-09-2008, 08:35 AM
...and the winner of this contest is...Heatwave316 (http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/members/heatwave316/) Thanks to everyone for entering - it was great to see 160 entries for this contest, although it was hard to read about some data loss stories - I feel your pain, I know what it's like. For the 159 of you who didn't win, and to everyone else reading this, I'd really encourage you to back up your data if you're not already doing so. An external USB hard drive is a great way to start, but automatic online backups are an even more economical way to back up your data and they have the added protection of being off site - that local hard drive sitting next to your computer? Fire, flood, theft, or any number of other things will take that hard drive out if it takes your computer out. My personal choice for online backups is Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/?ref=3f9a896b&kbid=30184&m=4&i=75) [Affiliate], and they just so happen to have a 10% discount coupon this month. The coupon code is DECEMBER. I'm currently backing up just over 180 GB of data with Mozy (yeah, it took a while to upload) and all my restore tests have worked quite well. Give it a try!

slugbug
12-09-2008, 08:24 PM
Congrats to the winner!

Heatwave316
12-11-2008, 04:47 AM
Thanks to Digital Home Thoughts & Seagate!!!