Tuesday, January 17, 2012

What’re the odds.

About a week ago my backup hard drive went on the fritz.  Wasn’t working, so I couldn’t keep backing things up.

Yesterday, as I was starting to back things up on my brand newDSC_0092 backup hard drive, my computer died.  Completely fried the hard drive.  Great.  Lost. Everything.  Well, except for my pictures, which fortunately were backed up on a third hard drive.

I took the computer down to Best Buy and talked to the Geek Squad.  He checked it’s hard drive and gave me the bad news, completely kaput.   I asked him if there was any way to get the information off of it and he told me that it was still possible, as bad as it was, but that it would entail sending it off to somewhere, that it would have to be completely disassembled in a controlled environment.  Then they might be able to get at the info.  Cost?  $2,100, or more.  (Blood pressure spike).DSC_0091

So I went home, got the old back up drive and brought that down.  With my heart pumping at a million beats a second I waited five minutes for him to check it.   First good news of the weekend – he could get at most, if not all, of the information on that one.  (Blood pressure returns to normal).  Not the $2,100, but I did have to shell out $200 for a new 3TB hard drive and the $99 recovery fee.  So with the new 2TB back up drive I already have and the one I bought for the transfer, I’m going to see if 3 copies of everything will be sufficient.

Unfortunately, the information is a week old.  A week which included year-end files for the pizza place’s payroll, their first payroll of the new year, and some work I did on book covers for my writer friend, Lisa Shafer.  (Sorry Lisa, we’re going to have to start over again, though I will still have the files I had when you came over this weekend).DSC_0090

And then I had to spend another $700 for a new computer.  It is a lot faster than that 5 year old one I had, but I still had to spend a bunch of time re-installing programs, and I’m not even done yet.  Bleah.  Oh, and it does have the hookups for dual monitors, which you can see in the picture.  As I write this, it’s in the process of backing up my photos, and all the new stuff on this computer.

Life – sometimes it’s the tasty fruit, sometimes it’s the pits.

3 comments:

Alexia said...

Aaarrgghh!

Last year I bought a new back-up drive, gave my old one to my son, backed everything up on the new one, tripped on the cord and sent it crashing to the floor. The fall had damaged beyond repair the USB port. Merde!
Son had already erased all my stuff and backed up his own laptop. Merde x2!

Luckily I was able to bring it to school where lovely Mr Techie took out the drive (we had to totally demolish the case) and put it into a desktop where I was able to access most of the stuff.

Glad you didn't suffer high blood pressure for too long :)

Lisa Shafer said...

Oh!
Been there, done that!
Do you recall that just last August my hard drive and external hard drive died at the same time?! Yeah. I owe Tyson at Simply Mac on State Street for saving everything. Seriously, we only lost a few photos (which I had on a flashdrive anyway) and about 100 songs. So stressful, though!
I ended up spending about $500 on a new hard drive and a new external hard drive.
Don't worry about my stuff. We got it all on my flashdrive and we can rebuild from there.
Sorry this happened to you, but -- believe me -- I DO understand.

Max Sartin said...

Well, glad to hear I'm not the only one to suffer through this, although sad to hear you had to too. Hopefully the triple back up is going to prevent that problem in the future. hopefully.