The story of Lazarus, revisited

[Taxloss]

You may all remember my laments here a few months ago after my desktop computer failed.

That meant I had to buy a new desktop.

More gallingly, it meant that I lost a trove of data built up over ten years. All sorts of stuff was suddenly gone.

My brother-in-law works "in computers". He and I struggled for hours to save me hard disk. His expert verdict was - "it's dead".

A lot of the stuff on my desktop was backed up on my laptop. But two weeks after my desktop failed, my flat was burgled. My laptop was the only thing stolen. I lost EVERYTHING. It was a devastating blow.

That was in the spring.

Two days ago, my brother-in-law emailed me to say: "Hey, I've just heard of a new way of reviving dead hard drives."

This evening, we tried it. It works. All my data is recovered.

"Euphoric" does not begin to describe my mood.

[lazarus]

1. howdy

:hi:

[Taxloss]

3. Lazarus!

You're back!

/crapjoke

[Der Blaue Engel]

2. Congrats!

:) My iBook died a few months ago and I'm still hoping to be able to retrieve my writing from the hard drive...four novels and a dozen short stories. :o

[Taxloss]

4. I only lost two novels, but EIGHTY short stories.

And now they're mostly back!

[Syncronaut Seven]

5. howd'ya do it?

Im curious

[Taxloss]

6. Well, I'm not a techie

But the previous attempts involved removing the HD from the CPU enclosure and trying to get it to spin up in a diferent enclosure. That didn't work.

The HD has a small bit of circuit board on it though. My BIL removed this today, found it was burned out, and replaced it. The disk was still screwy - I will have to destroy it - but we got it working long enough to burn "My Documents" onto a DVD. He found the solution here:

www.deadharddrive.com

[fedsron2us]

7. Yours is the oldest story in IT

There are two types of people who work with computers

- Those who back up their data

- Those who are about to find out why they should have backed up their data

Fortunately, nowdays their are a number of get out of jail cards for those in the second category. I am glad you got your data back but would recommend that you archive your most valuable stuff to CD, another hard disk, tape, a flash stick, paper, carved stone tablets or almost any other medium that would survive a system crash.

[Taxloss]

11. The, the problem was partly that I had backed up,

but it was all backed up on the laptop. Losing one computer I could anticipate; losing both within the space of 12 days, I did not insure against.

Rest assured that I am now the biggest backer-upper in the business.

[lockdown]

12. Got all your audio stuff safely backed up too I trust...

[Taxloss]

13. Audio?

Other than a few MP3s of songs, I didn't keep much audio. My interviews are taped on microcassettes.

[fedsron2us]

14. I know the feeling only too well

Five years ago I experienced a similar nightmare scenario on a company database when a system failure occurred just as the daily data dumps were being run. When we tried to recover the system the backup files were found to be corrupted. After many sleepless hours the system was eventually salvaged by restoring to the previous data dump and then rolling forward a whole days work using the transaction log. I think it was this event that started to turn my hair grey.

[lockdown]

8. You misspelled my

You need to sack your proofreader I reckon, what with that on top of the Chavez thing. ;)

[Taxloss]

15. Where did I misspell "my"?

What Chavez thing?

[lockdown]

16. "me hard disk"

Just a bit fun, coming just after you'd admitted your Chavez piece needed some slight proofreading. :)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4797601#4798198

[Taxloss]

17. You omitted the word "of".

:D

All journalism gets proofread. Maybe they caught the tiny errors on the other piece.

[lockdown]

18. Of?

:)

Yeah, interesting piece anyway. wouldn't have noticed the Robinson thing myself, hardly detracted from it!

[Taxloss]

19. "just a bit fun"

It happens to everyone.

[lockdown]

20. Yeah, very true.

We all make silly typos.

[LeftishBrit]

9. Great news!

Glad you got the data back! What a nightmare, though!

I tend to send important things to myself by e-mail, so that even if something happens to the computer I can still retrieve it from the e-mail message. But it does mean that my e-mail is usually very near its storage quota limit!!!

[Benbow]

10. Cool - I can identify with that

Last Monday lunchtime, my pc was nuked via the telephone line. I didn't know that could happen - I have been using desktop computers every day since they first appeared in offices in the UK in the early 1980s, and I have a power surge suppressor on the mains electricity point - and am going to buy a suppressor for the telephone line ASAP. I called out one pc repair person, recommended by a friend, who arrived two hours late, spent 20 minutes opening the case (I have a Dell, and quite a lot of people seem unable to open a Dell tower case in the way it is designed to be opened), and after an hour said he didn't know what was wrong. I took his card out of my card index file and tore it up; then called out pc repair person the second, who makes his living repairing and refurbishing pcs, and he also took 20 minutes to open the case and another hour to decide that he didn't know what was wrong.

Luckily, the third repair person was able to diagnose the cause (correctly) OVER THE TELEPHONE and then replaced the power supply. I got my pc back on Friday. Despair turned to joy; pitch-black night to brightest dawn. The birds sang again. The week ended much better than I dared hope.

Happily, both motherboard and hard disk seem unscathed. I do back up but never enough. For my own sanity, though, I did spend some time this week analysing which contributory elements of this scenario I must change. So that, in the event of another nuke, I will not feel like diver whose oxygen line has just been cut.