Backups are important, huh?
Well, I just had an interesting experience. A very good friend of mine recently rang me up (being the “computer guy”) and said, my computer is saying that it can’t write to my disk. A long story short, the hard disk he had all his home business and personal data on was dying. Basic analysis said that this problem was beyond my means, and he had no current backup.
The sad thing is the disk itself was only 300MB big (it was a very old disk) and unfortunately he did not do any backups on a regular basis. I personally blame myself as I never thought to ask him about his backups whenever I did any work on his PC. Whenever a friend has a problem with their PC, I always take it personally. Even if I didn’t sell him/her the PC, or do any work on it, or could be anyway responsible for what happened.
So off the disk went to Computer Forensics in Auckland, NZ. I’ve heard good things about them, and they come recommended from some other people. The good news is I just heard back, almost all data recovered (some minor stuff that he actually had (old) backups of was lost). The bad news was the price was around $1700. This is a huge amount of money for a home business.
So now I hold in my hand a 2GB USB flash drive which will hold all of his data, 6 fold. The plan is to store the data on the USB drive and backup to the hard disk in his computer (or vice-versa, he hasn’t decided yet). The danger of using USB as a primary storage is every once and awhile USB flash drives can spontaneously decide to wipe all their data. This usually happens because the user removes the drive without safely stopping it, or the power shuts off.
Now of course, if he had the USB drive last week, he never would have been in this boat.
Time travel would be a very profitable business.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:16 am
My 2gig USB flash (samsung rundisk 2.0) has survived many a fall, constantly being removed without stopping, much data being added and wiped, and a run through the washing machine (dried it on top of the heater before reuse). Still though I fear the day when it decides to die. It’s lasted longer than some CD’s I’ve burned. Occasionally I take a copy of the data, and there’s nothing on it I can’t recover (mostly utilities). But that day when I plug it in and it’s gone, you’ll hear a loud expletive from whereever I am.
Hard disk recovery appears to be a good business, that’s $5.66 a meg, assuming the drive was full. A quick search on DSE for HDD’s shows even a small one with bad $ to gigs ratio comes in at $0.00175 per meg. I remember when a new HDD was about $1/meg heh