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.