Oh my gosh! I’m screwed. I’m dead. I’m sooo dead. You guys have to help me. I won’t live through tonight. My SO. WILL. KILL. ME
I’ve been storing all of our priceless digital data in a backup drive in an external enclosure. It’s supposed to be a backup, but I’ve been getting ready to put everything in a RAID 1 NAS setup to keep things safe, so I had been MOVING stuff from the HTPC and the main PC into it in preparation. I ordered a small two bay NAS from newegg a few days ago and it was scheduled to arrive yesterday.
I even left a note out for the guy and included the tracking number and told him to please leave it in the hall. No go. The guy didn’t even leave a notice. He probably didn’t even get out of his truck. Thing is, this has happened before. I was actually home once and was checking on the status of a package I was expecting on the UPS website every few minutes. The status suddenly went from “out for delivery” to “Attempted to deliver, no one home”. The fuck? I was home! I went outside just in time to see the truck go by. Bastard.
So I was supposed to have had my NAS yesterday. I would have backed up everything and all our digital memories and documents would have been safe from hard disk failure at least.
This morning I wake up to move a couple of other things and I get an I/O error on the external drive. It appears to be toast. All our pictures, our movies (even the naughty ones!), everything. Gone.
This happened once before and it was my fault. I rebuilt a raid array using the wrong source disk and wiped the disk. Even data recovery couldn’t find it all. My SO nearly left me.
I’m so screwed. Not only will she kill me, but all my digital backups of my programs are in there, including license keys.
I’m going to try and take the drive out of the enclosure and hook it up directly to my PC. I’m thinking the motor is shot though, in which case only a data recovery company can help. But I hear they are super expensive, and I can’t afford that kind of expense right now. Specially since it seems I’m going to have to pay out of pocket for the infamous hospital visit I pitted last week (my insurance doesn’t want to pay and dealing with them is a time wasting nightmare).
Any advice? I’ve heard of people putting the drive in the freezer… or is that batteries?
Fuck UPS! My digital life wouldn’t be in shambles if it wasn’t for them!
No, that’s hard drives, though I do know some people who keep batteries in the fridge or freezer for some reason. Over the past several years, I’ve had about 5 or 6 drives go bad on me, and the freezer trick only worked on one of them. Leave it in there for about an hour, but definitely try to hook it up to your PC before you do that.
Data recovery costs so much because they basically have to buy an identical drive, then change the platters out in conditions so clean that one speck of dust could be disastrous. Or at least, that’s what I’ve always read.
Also, guess where my data recovery software (and the license key) is located…
I’m now thinking ahead and trying to save money. I’m thinking of returning the NAS to new egg and instead getting a much cheaper hot plugin Hd enclosure for my main PC. I’ll have one disk in there for the OS and stuff, and mirror two drives that’ll act as my backup for all the data. It should be safer than relying on the NAS I was getting at least (some reviewers were having problem with the firmware formatting the wrong disc), and the easy internal enclosure should make the drives accessible in case I need to replace one, or in case of an emergency (like a fire or something). Is this a good idea?
What about internet based backup solutions, are they very expensive?
I’m not even sure why I’m thinking so far ahead. If I don’t that drive working I may very well be dead come tonight.
Guys, If I don’t come on tomorrow on the boards at all, you’ll know who did me in.
I’ve had lots of postal workers do this…leave me a yellow “We missed you!” note in my mailbox which I got after I WATCHED THEM PUT MAIL IN MY MAILBOX AND NEVER GET OFF THEIR HAPPY ASSES, but I always kinda figured that since they were government employees, they had the ability to be lazy fucking assholes without any real repercussions, because you have to kill someone to get fired from a government job. I figured if I could suck at my job all day long, without real consequences, I’d probably end up doing it too.
But UPS is a privately-owned company, not the fucking government, so I’d be pissed as fuck if they did the same thing. As it is, it annoys me that they just leave packages in front of my door. I live in an apartment; people walk by my door all the damn time. Who’s to say somebody can’t just grab my package? If I lived in a house, with its own front porch etc., leaving the package is a bit more reasonable. But an apartment complex with other tenants two inches away??
If I’m not home, the apartment office accepts packages for tenants; that’s what the lazy fuckers are SUPPOSED to do.
And I’m sure if one of my packages did get snatched, that’s what they’d swear they did.
Fuckers.
As for the rest of your OP…yeah, you’re kinda fucked, man. She’s going to be furious.
Heh, well at least I have a happy ending. The freezing trick worked like a charm, or at least long enough for me to create a (still corrupted) image of the drive. I managed to save about 95% of all pictures and videos (even the naughty ones!) as well as most of my programs.
YAY!
And now everything is back up, and all important data resides on the main PC + on a separate RAID 1 array.
I want to hate on delivery companies too! Two days ago DHL left a note on the door downstairs that they tried to deliver a package despite the fact that no one buzzed my apartment. Then yesterday they show up and actually deliver the package. I was bogged down by the stomach flu so I was moving pretty slowly (and I looked like I had the flu…very unkempt and flushed wearing an old ratty bathrobe) and when I got to the door the guy said, “Finally! What’s your name?” and before I could even tell him my name so he could verify that he delivered the package correctly he left! I hope I gave that rude fucker the flu. Asshole.
