Reprieve
A few months back, I reported on how my DVR’s hard drive suddenly crapped out, taking with it a few hundred hours of programming I had saved up. As it turned out, the disk came back to life after a few days, and I got the data back.
Well, a similar thing happened a few weeks ago with a hard drive on my computer. As it happens, it’s my biggest–a 500 GB drive–and I had not backed up the full disk when it suddenly blanked out. At first, it just wouldn’t show up on my computer, and then it did show up–completely blank. Fortunately, I knew better than to write a single bit of data on the disk, and instead kept it pristine so I could attempt to restore the data… but no luck there. Attempts to repair whatever damage had occurred failed, and data-retrieval software looked futile–the trial version of such software that I tried either couldn’t recognize the disk format, or took hours to catalog thousands of fragments, but few usable files.
I was all set to give up when I plugged the disk in yesterday in one last attempt to retrieve the data–and suddenly the drive returned with all the data intact. Provisionally, however–the computer reported an error and that the disk would only be semi-functional. But that turned out to mean that the disk is now just read-only, with all the data being copiable–and so I’ve been busy copying and backing up on DVD-Rs.
I have to say, I’ve been pretty damned lucky in this area the past several months.
That is very lucky. My girlfriend’s hard drive started acting weird, the computer running slowly and data taking forever to read/write. Sometimes it just froze up and didn’t work at all, but other times it managed to run reasonably well.
I networked it to my computer and managed, over a day or three, to suck all the data off of her HD. Then it ran okay for a bit, then crapped out again. She took it to the Apple store where she found that the warranty had run out just about a month earlier… but they replaced the HD anyway for her. Good customer service.
The only problem we’ve had is in re-syncing up her iPod with her (new) iTunes on the computer; I wasn’t able to get her music from the hard drive before it crapped out and now Apple’s DRM is totally confounding our ability to get her tunes back. They’re on the iPod but it doesn’t think her new hard drive is the right computer.
The guys at the Genius Bar told her there’s a way to do it, but it’s unofficial so they can’t tell her… or something. I don’t know- it seems ridiculous to me and I think one of these days she should just go back in there and keep raising a stink until they fix it.
Which is yet another reason to hate DRM. But I digress.
Backup, folks. We all say we need to do it and we don’t get it done and sooner or later we’ll pay for it. 😉
Paul:
He is probably talking about the various software programs devised to bring music from an iPod to a computer. He can’t mention any specific one probably because they circumvent the “official” Apple way of doing stuff, like jailbreaking an iPhone. Try these out for a start:
iRepo (shareware; might not work without paying, I don’t know)
Senuti (donationware)
iPodTrans (freeware)
iRepo is the only one that outright claims to do what you need, but all three might work. Sometimes pay-shareware will still work without paying, but it might not. You might want to try the free ones first.
Recently my wife’s hard drive crashed (a head crash) – and we hadn’t backed up for a year… she had a year’s worth of work on it – work for her job and 30 hours/week of master’s program school work… an absolute disaster. We learned two things: 1) backup even if your computer is fairly new and shiny and reputable (it can happen anytime), 2) if it goes to crap, there ARE services that can retrieve most or even all of your data… for a cost. (We used DriveSavers.com) In our situation a payment in excess of two grand was actually worth it, as painful as it was – we recovered probably 95% of the work. To save thousands of hours of work was clearly the lesser of two evils.
Ouch. I would have suggested data retrieval software, but a head crash is different. Really highlights the importance of backing up, that’s for sure….
I think the usb external hard disks are not too expensive ($200). Yet I think that many folks tend not to give them priority.
A wise zen master once told me:
– There are two kinds of people in the world, those who have lost data, and those who are about to lose data. Make sure you are in the latter group.
I can’t fault his logic!