There has been quite a bit of data loss going around lately. Just before it all started happening, I got this sickening feeling in my gut like it was going to happen to me. But, so far, it has only been on the periphery.

A friend of mine called me up to say that his computer was running slowly. I tried to troubleshoot it, but it started moving again, so the problem eluded me. I didn't know it at the time, but his system drive was beginning to fail.

A friend of his was working on designing a new web site for us and his computer crashed, causing him to lose all his work.

The other instances escape me at the moment, but I recall someone else was having trouble or just suffered a disk crash. It is never fun when a hard drive dies.

Even before all this happened, my wife knew I was concerned about data loss, especially since the power keeps going out in the shop, and she called me from CostCo one day asking me about a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) that she was looking at. It turned out it was an excellent deal, so she bought it.

The UPS is now protecting my computers against power surges and power failures.



Shortly thereafter, my friend shipped his ailing drive to me and ordered a new drive and had it shipped to me as well, since I'm the guy with the data recovery tools. Or at least I thought so. Without going into the laborious details, I spent a day and a half on the operation. Nothing is ever easy.

I had a RAID controller that caused me much grief in the past that I was hoping to use to make an image copy of the sick drive, but it didn't deal well with media errors, so it quit. I then tried some other tools with some success, but it left the new drive unbootable. In the end, I finally downloaded the latest drivers, etc., for my RAID controller and was able to create an image copy of the drive, sans bad sectors. The jury is still out as to whether the OS will boot once it is installed back in the host machine - since I just dropped it back in the mail - but I am hopeful that the operation was a success.



The old drive was 30GB, and the new drive was 80GB. I used to own the computer (and the 30GB drive that was in it), so this incident could have been my own. In fact, I fear that I could have a problem, since I am currently operating with a 120 GB drive that is not backed up. I have two 120 GB drives (in the picture above) that were used in an earlier recovery operation when I did lose access to all my data (as a result of my RAID card, and a horrible thing called "dynamic disks", thank you Microsoft). I have been waiting until I can sit down and finish writing a program to validate that I did, in fact, recover all my files intact (I didn't trust the buggy data recovery software that I used at the time), but I think I'm playing with fire by continually waiting. I think the waiting is over and I need to install one of these drives so I can back up my existing 120GB drive that currently has my life on it.

I actually haven't had my computer case open in a while, so it had plenty of time to collect dust. Ick! Look at all that nastiness!



So, my next step is to install the backup drive and clean out the dust. After that, I am going to configure another computer that we are not currently making good use of, to be a file server with some backup software running on it that works over the network, so I can save my critical files in an "off-site" manner. That way, if my computer gets struck by lightning or hit by a meteorite and both drives are killed, I will still have a backup of my data.

Whew!