An Eastertime Virtual Reincarnation - Recovering from total hard drive crash

Been awefully silent here at Communities Dominate blog this week. I had one of those ohno moments - a total catastrophic PC failure - the hard drive suddenly died. And by dead - the PC techs couldn't get it to revive even enough to pick off some data files. Dead as a dodo.

Well your HatRat is an ex PCrepairdude ("real men don't read manuals" and all that) - haha and yes, I am paranoid about my data, so I had a system to get total data recovered (almost) to the point of the failure. I lost less than 2 days of work product. And I was lucky to be home, not at a long customer trip abroad, so getting repairs and immediate tech support was easy. But as I need to do all of my consulting support on the road, there is no point in any desktop PC solution, all of my work related life is on my laptop. Very fatally a single point of failure, indeed.

But as the crash happened on Monday and my last backup was from Thursday night, it also did hit the weekend. On weekends I generally as a rule do not do "work" but the laptop has during this decade become ever more also an entertainment device, a converged home-and-office device very certainly. It is the depository for my digital photographs, the backup storage for my music and increasingly a collection of video files of all kinds from music videos to movie clips. And for all of those there are tons of applictions of software that I did not back up.

Oh, the joys of data recovery. It is one of those "drop everything else and get this matter resolved now" kind of disasters, obviously. You can't work if the hard drive is dead. Yes I can do some very basic internet surfing on the smartphone and do the occasional blog or email from it. But for "real work" which for me so often includes calculations on a spreadsheet, creating "pearls" onto Powerpoint, and writing related documents in Word, you need Google, you need an internet browswer and you need a good working environment ie full keyboard, big screen, swapping between apps and websites and cut-and-pasting documents, images, etc between the files.

And I don't mean to dismiss my powerful smartphones but I do write on the PC not on the phone ha ha. I am old...

So yeah, all hard drives die. We all know that. They are mechanical devices which wear out. They will go some day, often without any warning and with no recourse to recover any data. Reminder: do make sure YOU have a good backup plan for your data.

Second, think of the disruption today. We have giant hard drives on our laptops. even with high speed backup drives, it takes a lot of time just to recover the data. And the applications have grown to be enormous in size. Even if you happen to have all CDs and their various registration codes, to run through them all to reinstall the apps - gosh it took me 4 hours yesterday just to get the major work related apps reloaded to the repaired laptop with its new hard drive. After that comes the annoying sensation dozens of times, that you go into a familiar application that you use daily, and now it is NOT as you had configured it. All those personal settings you've made over the years. All gone..  argggghhh...

I really was a PCrepairguy once, full time job for a New York City PC/networking company called OCSNY which is now an internet service provider (and a darn good one if I may say, they were also the first internet service provider of New York). So yeah, I used to open PCs and install RAM and expansion cards for various peripherals like modems, networking cards, multimedia (sound) cards etc. That was almost 20 years ago, boy how time flies.

And since I could afford to buy my first personal computer (a 286 class IBM clone) in 1989, hey that was exactly 20 years ago, cool - I have owned or had personal computer provided by an employer (and often both) continuously. I have gone through 19 PCs, first desktops and then laptops. And those 19 PCs over the past 20 years have had now 17 total catastrophic failures, ranging from incapacitating virus attacks to failed power sources to a dead motherboard and even a cracked laptop display. And four times I've had a hard drive die on me.

When it happens it does make one re-evaluate the role of technology in our lives (as it does when we lose our phone or it breaks down). And watching that backup drive restore files and those names of thousands of subdirectories of past jobs and long-forgotten applications and past projects and interests it does also provide a kind of "my life passed in front of my eyes" moment - oh yeah, that trip, and yeah, whatever happened to her, and ha-ha, yeah, that was a project I once believed in, etc...

No major damage, only some time lost and very modest data loss. We will soon resume our regularly scheduled programming (ha-ha)

Comments

[Pierce Hickey]

Ouch!
I know you're not a Mac dude, but I've been saved (twice!) so far by Apple's Time Machine. It makes having a complete up to date backup (documents, photos, media, even the OS) soooo easy.

Even when my laptop was stolen I was able to restore everything to a new machine (apps, settings and all) within under 2 hours. I even kept my open Firefox tabs!

Of course, that just made me more aware of the need for a redundant off-site copy (just in case of fire, etc.)... Amazon S3 perhaps?

[ARJWRight]

Never a good thing to go through that; but in light of this, how does the potential of virtual backups and mobile-as-PC comes into play for someone like yourself.

Surely there's something of a trend that's going to be evident there soon too ;)

[otel]

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