I’m back…
I bent my wookie...
You know those ads on the Toronto subway, the “male clinic” ads? This posting isn’t related, regardless of the title.
June was a spectacularly insane month…
One incident I’ll share was that the disc drive on my G5 suffered a hardware failure. A pretty bad one. So bad, that I could not access any files from it.
Now, if one regularly backs up important files, losing a drive is more of an inconvenience, and perhaps, a loss of a day or so worth of data. You would need to purchase a replacement drive, re-install the operating system and programs, and restore the data. That could take a couple of hours (including digging through a pile of CDs and DVDs looking for the software, digging through drawers looking for serial numbers, and applying the dozens of software updates after it’s been installed). And if you have a lot of data (it’s surprising just how big a music and photo collection can be – in my case, we’re talking approximately 160GB combined), it will take another few hours to reload this from backups. So, perhaps within a day, you’re back in business.
This is assuming that you make regular backups. In my case, the last backup I did was in early August, 2005. I went a whole 10 months without backing up. So the “loss of a day or so” didn’t apply in my case. I nearly had a heart attack… all of my work over the last year was inaccessible, and for all I knew, completely lost. All of my company documents, source code, this web site, and all of my photos from the last year, including my entire abandoned sites series, were gone. A disaster.
Even though panic was setting in, I refrained from trying to “fix” the drive myself, thinking that if the data was trapped on the drive, I’d most likely make matters worse. Even though I am a “computer professional”, my area of expertise isn’t even remotely related to recovering data from a sick drive (and, as clearly demonstrated, I’m not so good with the whole “saving data in case of a disaster” issue either…) After pounding my forehead against a wall for a few minutes, I called up Nic for advice. Nic, through his work, has to occasionally deal with recovering data for his clients, and I figured he’d know what to do. He recommended ActionFront Data Recovery. He said they were not cheap, but had good success with them. Even though the name sounded like a fascist organization, I took a look at their website, and the fact that Seagate owned them was enough for me (Seagate is one of the world’s largest hard drive manufacturers). I decided to send them my damaged drive.
So… ten days, half a bottle of antacid, countless drinks, and $2,000 repair charges later, a brand new disc drive, with almost every file of mine intact, was shipped back to me. What a relief! There were a few files that were corrupted, most notably the Lehighton Graffiti series was lost, but all the rest of my data was recovered (including all of the RAW photo files, so with some effort, I can re-create lost series).
When I went to reformat the drive (after I had thought I retrieved all that was possible), the size of the drive didn’t make sense – the format utility reported that it could only make a 128GB partition, but there was 250GB of data on the drive… Clueing into what was going on, I rushed out and picked up a “modern” external enclosure, popped the drive in, and voilà! All my files were back! Well, I’m missing a couple minor files, but every photo series is back. Whew!
Interestingly, when the recovered data was sent back, there was an error with the drive’s physical format. Instead of sending it back on an SATA drive, ActionFront sent it on an PATA drive. That was annoying, in that my G5 only has SATA. However, I had an old external FireWire enclosure, so I just popped it in there. However… the key word is “old”… The older enclosure could only read up to 128GB, while the recovered dive was a 250GB drive. What this meant was that even though it looked like I could see all the files on the drive, a number of them were inaccessible. They appeared to copy over fine, but the contents of the “files” where just random garbage.
What have I learned? Well, the obvious. I should have backed up my data. Regularly. Maybe even daily.
The problem I had, and I think that most people have, is that backups are a pain in the ass, so they are done very infrequently. That, and the sheer volume of data I need to back up (160GB, and growing, isn’t trivial) only adds to the burden.
I’m now in the process of designing an easy backup strategy that will guarantee that I’ll never have to go through this agony and expense again. The first thing I did was purchase a second drive for my G5 to mirror my primary drive. Next, I’ll most likely purchase a NAS (I’m looking at the 1TB network drive from Buffalo Technology), and use that as my backup and media server. That will protect me from any hardware failures. And, to protect against fire and flooding, I’ll probably pick up a second NAS and find a place to co-locate it (maybe at my father’s home), and update it automatically at night via the Interporn™. There’s just too much data to backup by burning DVDs (and, besides, I don’t trust the reliability of recordable DVDs for backups).
I certainly dodged that bullet…
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