Disaster Stikes!

Perhaps not the end of the world, but bad all the same was the day my ageing PC started to play up.  Nothing major, just a little glitch when searching for a drive via My Computer which was to lead to a far more dramatic glitch two days later.  Unfortunately as is often the case it was someone else using the PC when the glitch turned into a major CRASH! 

Yes, my hard drive was dead!  On the plus side I had been backing up the drive to an external 500GB Buffalo drive so my 8,500 photographs and a thousand documents and such were saved, except two.  Sadly these two documents represented over six years of hard work on my part and for some reason I had been working on them from a temporary folder on the PC's Desktop and not from within the folders being automatically backed up.  An oversight and one which I have only just started to recover from.

I had loaded versions of "my book", a first draft that I was working into a new and hopefully much improved draft that would find its way onto the internet somewhere.  I had spent hundreds of hours changing small parts of the book, adding anecdotes or removing items that were irrelevant.  I had, I hope, injected some humour and all in all started to produce something better.

I tried every trick in the book to recover the disk but unfortunately the fault was mechanical and only a factory restoration by a professional company was possible.  I searched the internet for "cheap recovery services" and found nothing, only constant nudges towards Seagate.  Incidentally, the drive was a Seagate drive as was the much earlier drive that had crashed a couple of years earlier but one which I had managed to rescue literally days before it finally died.  So what better an idea than to contact Seagate with my sad story and see if I could negotiate a deal to get my disk restored, if not for free at least at a decent discount.  Anyway, after several calls to various Seagate locations I eventually found myself back at the start of the process and no offers of discounts.  

It is only now that I had started work again on another draft revision nearly six months after the disk failure but at least motivated to get working.  I now rather obsessively back up to the external drive  and have a new Samsung hard drive.  Interestingly Seagate now own the Samsung hard drive business so I am right back with them again.

Well, these days I have what I now call my "PSB" or paranoid system backup or "PBS" paranoid backup system, whatever.  I have two external hard drives, one backing up both the MY DOCUMENTS and MY PICTURES folders.  A second smaller external drive for downloads and programme set  up Winrar files and a THIRD hard drive that contains a clone of my current system.  I keep this Seagate (yes them again) drive in a separate room in a box marked "Cloned Disk".  I know, it's sad. But I can't face the prospect of the loss of over 9000 photographic images and countless documents so I take no chances. 

I use the software supplied with the Buffalo external drive to run the live back up plan "Memeo backup premium" and Acronis True Image Home to clone my hard drive (I keep this cloned version up to date as well). You can of course use only one application to do what I do but using Memeo is just simpler and works well for me.  

Someone said in regard to backing up and data loss (an American),  "It is an inconvenient truth to lose files, it sucks". Yes, it does especially if you have been working on them for years!

Good luck and safe backing up and avoid this!