Hard Drive Crash

By Thomas Bihl

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Crash?? The devil you say. What’s a crash? It’s fixable - Right? WRONG!

I write this article for those of you who have not had this, “unique” but not so unusual, experience so that you may learn from my mistakes. Understandably, we all make mistakes, but, the mistakes I’ll share with you can be extremely costly in both time and money.

A few weeks ago I might even have said or asked the above questions. To someone who has not experienced a “crash” - malfunction (serious malfunction) of their hard drive this was a devastating, time consuming, and frustrating experience. Each day that has gone by since the crash, I have discovered additional information or programs I’ve lost.

I have been using personal computers for several years now, both at home and my full time job. Over the course of the years, we have used several machines. None, not a one, did I ever have a problem with the hard drive, except running out of memory and having to upgrade - till now!

Now, mind you, I have lots of disks that I copied to all the time. Probably not categorized like they should be, but, have them none the less. So, being complacent, since I have had no problem, I continued to copy kind of haphazardly and did not do a structured backup. BIG MISTAKE!! Oh yea, another reason for complacency. You are using fairly new equipment so nothing’s going to happen - right? WRONG again!
Another big MISTAKE!

The computer I was using, when it decided to go “bonkers”, was 1 year and 2 weeks old. Of course it had a 1 year warranty. Wow! Do they know when to break or what?

Hey, I lucked out on that point. I found where I had purchased an additional 3 year, on site, service agreement at the same time I bought the machine. Only, one little problem, it’s still sitting under my desk awaiting repair. It went down over two weeks ago. The agreement just said they’ll fix it, not when.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have more than one computer at home (which is where I conduct my online business), but, I only had the one. I immediately purchased a new machine so the longest I would be down was 24 hours. Now, when the other one is fixed, I’ll patch them together and utilize it as a “mirror” site so to speak for full backup. This was the first major monetary expense.

Little did I know, then, the amount of time that was going to be consumed while trying to piece together what I had lost. I soon found, while it was necessary to do as much as possible, it was going to be an impossible task.

I should add here that I called a data recovery company to get an idea of the cost of trying to recover the data from the dead drive. (all is does is go clickety - definite sign something is wrong). They advised me that, first they would tear it down to see what they could do. This would probably take about 3 hours and then they quote on cost. I was also told this part of the process was at no charge. They went on to say that if they worked on it and could not recover the data there would be no charge. But, if they do recover data, it would be $100.00 per hour and could be anywhere from $300 to $2,500 depending, of course, on how much time would be spent in the recovery process. Needless to say, I nixed this idea.

I lost several programs I had purchased and downloaded from the net, but, not that much. It’s still going to cost some to replace them - this was the next monetary expense.

One of the biggest losses I experienced were the files in my mail program ( I thought I had copies on separate disks - nope!). These were online business records and the subscriber list to the “GenSale Gazette” newsletter. Ouch! This hurt! I have since recovered somewhat by posting notices for people to re-subscribe because of equipment failure in addition to new postings around the net. This was one of the major time expenses.

All in all, I guess it could have been worse, although, right now I’m not sure how. Things seem to becoming together again. But, I can tell you and warn you; if you don;t think this can happen to you - you’re setting yourself up for one humongous fall. Unfortunately, I now have to say “been there, done that! It ain’t fun!” I can assure you that you don’t want to. Make sure you back everything up no less that once a week, but, optimally, daily is best. In fact, I stopped writing for a few minutes and backed up. I’m not going through this again if at all possible.

If I leave you with nothing else from this experience - even if you have never had one little glitch - knowing you probably back up your web site on a regular basis - I can’t emphasis enough - BACK-UP YOUR PC’s REGULARLY!! The information you save, may be irreplaceable, some of mine was!