My Hard Drive

Trying to explain what happen to my hard drive and why I cried.

This is a Hard Drive … not mine… but a picture of one.

Not Hitachi but think Seagate

One day I logged on and couldn’t see my drive through windows.

The Hard drive consist of two different main parts

Controller board

this is where you plug your power and data cord into to help the computer read your data. These can go bad, and trap the data in it’s little nest.

Where the data storage is…

This is where your Data lives

If your not in a clean room at this point… data is the least of your worries

Let’s take inventory shall we:Fingerprints on platter. LOL

Reading h

ead.. I

t’s why

you sh

ouldn’t just h

ard

stop w

indow

s…. B

ut wait

FOREVER for it to

“shut d

own”

Platters.. It the Heart of the whole system.

Rare earth magnetics. At this point good for your kids art work.

And then…

K a b o o m ! !

My life’s work…

Totally didn’t have a back up.

And this pretty much sums up how I feel….

Your take away:

What to do: (even for personal photos)

• Have a backup/recovery plan

• Actually carry out that plan (i.e. my recover plan was building a file server… my drive died before it was finished)

• Keep it separated and backup.

• Don’t have a single point of failure. (i.e. use different methods)

• Most importantly: K.I.S.S. ( if you cant understand how to recover the files… it’s worthless.)

Backing up sounds expensive

Online backup:

1 Mozy (2gb's for free. 4.95 a month for "unlimted storage")

2 Sos online back up (for home users up to 15gb for 49.95 a year

3 Carbonite (54.95 a year for "unlimited Storage" (pronunced 'ter-ə-,bīt)

Hard drives last at most 5years …. DVD's last at a minimun twice that.. If not longer.

Phyiscal means

1 DVD's 4.7 gb's $19.95 for 50pc

2 Dual Layer DVD 8.5 gb's $30.00 for 50pc

3 Blue Ray 25 gb's $36.00 for 15pc

Recovering data from a drive is from 400 up to 3,000 dollars and not guranteed.