A Moment of Sadness

It is with great sadness that I report the following…unless a miracle of technology occurs, my 320GB portable hard drive is dead.

Unfortunately, all my pictures since 2001 were on this drive.  I did manage to back up my pictures from 2007 and 2008 onto another drive before it died, and I do have 99% of my pictures up on Flickr, but alas, I would think that I have lost any videos that were on the drive as I had never got around to uploading all the videos.  Plus, I’m sure there are a few pictures that I never managed to get up onto Flickr.

I have a vague recollection of doing regular backups of my pictures but a quick scan of my bedroom didn’t produce any results.  I’ll have to do a thorough scan the next time I’m over there.

I did read a few things I could try…one method of getting a hard drive to work again is to freeze the drive to that the mechanical parts retract.  I don’t know if this will work or not.  Mike and I tried it for a few hours at home yesterday with no success and I left it outside overnight and this morning it wasn’t working again.

Another big loss for me is the mass amounts of music that I had on the drive that (chances are) I never had backed up.  Sure, I have all my CDs which probably account for 80% of the music that was on there.  This is one reason I love buying CDs still.  If all my music was solely digital, I would have to go through the pain of downloading all that music again.  Unfortunately, I can say with great confidence that the remaining 20% were some good downloads…mostly live and rare tracks from my favourite bands…some live concerts that I attended in the past and are quite hard to find on the Internet again.

So what have I learned from this?  Well, I’ll keep trying to get the hard drive to work…I’ve even checked out some videos on Youtube on disassembling the hard drive and replacing the heads.  That will be my next solution.  It does require that I hunt down the exact model number of my broken hard drive to get the parts out.  This may be…ridiculous to achieve.

I have learned that it’s quite ridiculous to hold out on backing up information for the sole reason of ‘saving a few bucks’.  I knew the drive was failing a few months ago.  It just wasn’t working from time to time.  That should have been the point that hammered me over the head and said “Go spend the $100 and buy a new drive and transfer your data.”  In the end, instead of doing that, I am not without precious bits and bytes and wondering why I would have even waited to make such a purchase.  It’s silly, and there’s no excuse.  Just because it’s Christmas and money is needed elsewhere doesn’t mean a damn thing when it comes to pictures and other important data being lost.

Here’s my main point for all you faithful readers out there:  If there is important data on your hard drives, make it point to do regular backups, whether it be onto DVD, another hard drive, or uploading photos to Flickr.  The Flickr option may be the best option when you analyze the fact that a DVD may degrade over time as well as a hard drive.

If there is stuff on the drive that you really don’t care if you lose or not, well don’t fret too much about backing it up.  But it really doesn’t hurt to pick up a $100 external hard drive nowadays and use it solely for backing up information.  Especially if you have a Mac, they have the Time Machine backing up software which is supposedly amazing.

I vow to get my data off the drive no matter what but I’m sure there will be a stopping point.  I don’t think I feel like spending $500-$1000 to get my data recovered.  But I’ll keep my ears open for people who have tried different things to get their hard drives working and I’ll make an effort to get it off myself.  Hopefully in the future you’ll see a follow-up posting saying I was successful!