Death and Rebirth

No, I'm not talking about breathwork rebirthing simulations, I'm talking about hard drives and the data contained on them. About three weeks ago or so I was moving furniture (for those of you who know me and my living style well, this is normal, weekly behavior). I innocently and accidently unplugged my external hard drive which holds all of my photos from Niger plus some other somewhat important stuff like, say, my resume. (However, now that I'm a "lifer" at KLD and I will probably never get those databases to the point that my inner perfectionist requires, my resume probably isn't the most important document in my life.)

In any event, when I unplugged it, the whole world came crashing down, and when I plugged it back in, it started going "spin, click, spin, click, etc. etc." For those of you who don't know, this is a very bad sign. Very bad. It means that your machine can't access the data and therefore you have effectively lost it--unless you have a superduper lab in your basement or something. So anyway, for me this means at least one thing. I need data recovery. I am told this is very expensive.

Luckily, this has happened to me before, only last time it was my laptop and all my files were on my external (the external is/was 120GB and I think the laptop was something like 6, so they wouldn't fit anyway). So, in effect, I still had my files, plus I had all important docs backed up on an ftp site and my address book was on the network server at school. Thank the cosmos for that!

Ok, so boring technical stuff aside, this time I was lucky again--all of my Niger photos are on CDs (5 of them). And I even had my documents (including the most inane-or insane-college papers ever written) saved on one of the discs. I think I may have lost the papers I wrote in French, however, which is a shame because I probably couldn't understand them now or ever do it again. But who knows, maybe I'll move to Niger or France or something. Long story short, I got some of the most important data back and I only had to copy some files for a few hours. (For some reason there were errors on some files and I had to start over a little bit with some folders). So we can all be happy about this and take home an important message: BACK UP YOUR DATA. It's not worth the agony of losing it. (And if you're going to back it up on CDs, please keep them in a safe place where they won't get scratched.)

So yes, that's my exciting Saturday night. That and planning my meals from cookbooks. It's so exciting to eat when it's not just another burrito.

Anyone know a decently priced data recovery service?

Product FYI: The drive was a Western Digital with no power switch, and this was a known problem that they warn about in the set up guide. However, it was a stupid design. Really stupid. And I let them know that. Their newer models apparently have features that prevent this issue, but I was penalized for being ahead of my time, I guess. Happens to the best of us (and the worst).