How to Recover Your Data When Your Hard Drive Crashes (and You Didn't Back It Up)

David,

Coming from the Hard Drive Business (I use to design them) I can tell you that drives can fail for various reasons but it is typically a rare case with todays drives.  One thing to help prolong a drive crash (if it does occur) is on the desktops, do not turn the machine off, leave the drive spinning all the time.  Also, for critical data, use in house backup solutions or use memory sticks (flash sticks) to store all critical files such as contracts, pictures, etc. not program files.

Drives now a days are rated to not die or have a crash event for at least 5 years which most people would upgrade before that time anyways.

Like anything, redundancy is key!

rob

Just last week my husband's family commercial construction business lost their invoices for the past year due to a non-recoverable hard drive crash. 

I recently did a back-up on the pc because I was having some problems with it and was going to do some registry tweaks.  But I've yet to do so on the laptop, although it's mainly a network computer and the main pc has the most important things. 

Next time I do back-ups I will keep in mind that I don't need to do everything - just documents/photos.  That will make it quicker.

I was always afraid of doing it online because of security reasons but I guess that shouldn't be an issue.

Rob:  My hard drive was four years old.  I took it to the data recovery specialist that everyone in Atlanta recommended.  I was in a state of shock for a week when they broke the news to me.  It was a physical failure, kind of obvious by the grinding noise.  Leaving it on was not an option.  Truthfully, I had backed up some of the most important data on the desktop.  But the financials are always being updated and they were over two months old.  Thankfully, I did transfer those to my PDA just prior to the big bang.  It took weeks to pry them out of the PDA as a program converted them into an unusable format.  As a side note, I am convinced my data still exist with only minor corruption.  I just don't want to take the next step and send it to a forensics lab.

Judyo:  On-line back-up is not that big of a deal, as far as security goes.  Most people are backing up pictures and video that hackers are going to have no interest in.  Plus, it is much easier for them to send you a trojan to exploit your computer than it would be to hack into the servers that these companies use.  They claim something like a 448bit encryption.  I don't even know what that is!  Still, my guess is that it is a whole lot better than my 128bit. 

Basically what the Data Recovery companies are going to do is put you drive into a class100 clean room, take the drive apart, and rebuild it into a new stack (bascially take out the bad stuff and put it together with new stuff) assuming that the platters are not damaged otherwise, they may have to use some other software to try to retrieve it.

I am going to guess and say that they probably put a price tag of at least $4-5k for the operation...let me know

thanks

rob

Took it apart.  Found it damaged beyond repair.  Clean room and all...  They actually didn't charge anything as part of their deal.  Data and $$$.  No data... no charge.