Murphy's Law of Hard Drives
Murphy's Law of Hard Drives
Your laptop hard drive will unexpectedly and terminally fail after you have spent two months taking/saving photos that you have not saved anywhere else because your usual backup system (loading them on more than one computer and transferring files between computers) was out of service for two months.
And it will fail while you are on vacation.
And recovering the data on your hard drive will not work through any normal method.
Instead, it will be estimated to cost over $1200 to recover the data in order to retrieve photos of your child between the ages of 24 and 26 months as well as any photos you haven't blogged about yet. And the retrieval of said photos will not be guaranteed. But the departure of the mythic $1200 from your bank account would be for keeps.
So you will be forced to choose between being able to FEED your child for two months and having those photos back.
p.s. I chose the groceries. So it goes.
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Comments
We had almost the exact same problem two years ago, only in addition to photos from sibling weddings and Humphrey house, we also had some client work on there.
After having several geek friends look at it using various software recovery tools with no success, we ended up fretting and finally put up the money to send the drive to Drivesavers. After two weeks, were told Sorry! - there was nothing salvageable on the drive. These are people that get data off of HD's that have been through fires, but they couldn't do anything for us. So, the photos and work were lost for good.
Hopefully you have better luck.. I can imagine those two months of Grace's childhood are irreplaceable.
Posted by: Jason | March 27, 2008 1:12 PM
You could try something like:
http://www.spotmau.com/
And, no I have no relation to them.
Posted by: Aesop's Ant | March 27, 2008 1:47 PM
I feel your pain having had this happen twice in the past 12 months. The second time Apple offered to download as much as possible in store, which cost $200, rather than $1200, but all I got was a bunch of corrupted files. When the mac crashed it crashed hard!
I opted to buy a decent exterior hard drive rather than spend the extra to see if they could save anything else. Oh, and I upload as much as possible to Flickr.
Posted by: modernemama | March 27, 2008 2:08 PM
Would you find it comforting to know that entire years of my childhood went undocumented secondary to poverty, and I grew up to be a functional human being who loves my mom and dad? :)
Posted by: girl in greenwood | March 27, 2008 3:36 PM
Ugh! Sorry about your loss, Jeanne. What a bummer! Glad Grace can eat though.
Posted by: Sarah | March 27, 2008 3:48 PM
2 words jeanne
Ramen Noodles...
Posted by: mkshaffer in libertyville! | March 27, 2008 4:40 PM
Yikes! I have all 16 months of my sons life on my notebook and only 3 of them have been uploaded to flickr. We have an external drive for this purpose but there is nothing on it. Your post as given me the kick I needed. Thanks!!!!
Posted by: Danielle | March 27, 2008 9:44 PM
If you are on a Mac upgrade to Leopard. You can't believe how easy it is to back up via Time Machine. You'll need an external hard drive (Time Capsule is their recommendation). It's a life saver.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html
Posted by: tina | March 28, 2008 8:18 AM
uugh! Sorry to hear about that. I honestly feel your pain!
Posted by: Timothy | March 28, 2008 10:23 AM
Thanks all. We have mourned our old hard drive and we have moved on. I was able to retrieve a few things from the camera's memory card.
If our hard earned lesson helps anyone else avoid the loss of their digital data, we'll be happy!
Posted by: jm | March 29, 2008 8:08 AM
When you say it failed can you elaborate? If the motherboard died or something the drive will probably still be fine. If the motherboard is fine but the computer just doesn't turn on? Does it POST? Does it try to load and give you an error? Etc... recovering data from a Hard drive can be pretty easy if you know what you are doing, I've done it many times. maybe if I know more about your issue I can help and save you the $1200. Feel free to email me at mattw112 at hotmail dot com.
Posted by: Terry | March 31, 2008 9:33 PM
This information is quite to the point.
I'll be coming back to followmore in the future.
Posted by: Floyd Muratore | December 22, 2010 8:03 AM