Sometime ago, I wrote a piece titled Why you should backup data!, promising I would follow the article up in the future.

Several months down the road, the whole event reached a conclusion and lessons were learned. I’d like to impart some of that information on you, the reader, in the hopes you will not have to endure the hardships resulting from valuable lost data.

Firstly, and it really cannot harm to re-emphasize this: Back up your data now! So, come back and finish reading this once you are done backing up.

Right, where were we? Not only should you follow the simple advice and immediately back up your data, but you also need to make a long-term backup plan. It can be anything between periodically, manually copying your valuable files to a second hard drive, to going all out and investing in a mirrored RAID configuration of some degree. Of course, the former is a clunky slow method with a high chance of some loss if a drive fails (will you really be copying each and every day?), and the latter is very pricey, involves some tech know-how, and can still be fallible if you don’t know what you are doing. Indeed, other alternatives are also available, like Cloud syncing (great if you are sure you will be always connected and don’t have vast amounts of data) or backing up to DVD media (but yeah, this isn’t the 00s anymore). Whichever way you choose to go depends on your technical ability, your time availability, how connected you are, how fat your wallet is, and how much data you need to back up. These things will certainly be the main factors in your decision. So what did I do?

Let me start by telling you my story. Sitting on a 2TB external hard-drive, existed all of my high-resolution photography, and all other images taken in the previous 18 months. To me this was very very valuable data for which I could never recreate. I knew I had to get those files backed up, but procrastination and other life events like moving homes meant I just kept thinking, “I’ll get around to it soon”. Then one day, I turned the drive on, and zilch, nada, nothing.

Since my drive was under warranty with LaCie, I contacted their Tech Support to find out (following some half-arsed attempts by them at fixing the drive with a new power cord) that my drive would need warranty repair, but to note, any drive shipped to them for warranty service would be wiped clean of any data. If I needed the data back, I would need to do it before the warranty service took place. Since my drive had a likely PCB/circuit/electric problem (I got this from the fact there was no noise at all with the drive, no mechanical scratches or whirring whenever it was switched on or at the time of it failing), the drive would probably need taking out of the OEM casing to mount it on something else and pull the data. I contacted a local data recovery specialist to see if it is something they could do and got affirmatives it was, pending initial tests.

Here’s the catch, LaCie said they would not honour the warranty if the drive was removed from the OEM casing, but luckily, they have their own data recovery specialists who can do it and not invalidate the warranty. Prices…$399 to $1399 with LaCie’s own company (!) AKA D2 Recovery, or a guaranteed $600 with the local guys. Since the drive was worth only a shade over $100 and after researching these types of failures and making the educated guess that the price with LaCie would come in closer to $1399, I opted for the local guys MDS Disk Service. A successful return of all my data followed (I provided a new external drive, quelle horreur!) and these guys even let me do a repayment plan to spread the payment out. At this point I decided to send the drive to LaCie to see if the warranty would be undertaken (knowing for sure the drive had been opened from the OEM case) and to my eternal surprise, they still fulfilled the warranty request, which went a very small way to redeeming their name. I had my data back, and my drive repaired, but for the handsome costs of $600 plus shipping!

So, what have I done to prevent this happening to me again (for as sure as there is fire in hell, it will)? Reviewing my finances and options, I opted to go for a dual disk and sync the copying of files between them, as such, mirrored drives. A Newegg sale for $160 meant I speedily had 2x 2TB Toshiba 3.5inch drives in my hands of which I could slot straight into the 2 hot swap SATA bays on the front of my desktop PC at home. After Formatting the drives and partitioning them to mirror the same structures (e.g. drive 1: “X:\Photography”; drive 2: “Y:\Photography_Mirror”), I have also created scheduled tasks to copy from one location to the other. Whilst crude, and meaning some loss could occur if a hard drive failed before the next sync, the status of my backed up data is at a level I am happy with. Indeed, I have mirrored music files too, since I do not want the task of digitizing several hundred CDs ever again! A cloud solution for a terabyte of data was not feasible, and a RAID configuration to the standard I needed was too expensive.

And that’s my story. If you ever have any questions about data recovery or options for backing up data, I have been to the darkside and back so feel free to Contact Me.

And just for posterity, Back Up Your Data!

Peter