When Your USB Drive Crashes... Stellar

I get on a plane with my computer and an external USB hard drive.  I had a layover for a couple hours, so I decided to work on an upcoming presentation.  The computer is unbearably slow.  Then I realize that the computer nearly locks up when I click on the drive letter for the external drive.  Yeah... the external drive that has the VPC image on it for the demo. 

The demo due the next day.

The demo due the next day at 8am.

To make a long story boring, I winged the demo because the drive was crashed and unreadable.  There were tons of PowerPoint presentations and demos that I use on a regular basis that, while I can certainly re-create them, it would be a tremendous time sink to rebuild. 

But the pictures.  I had the grand idea of finding all of the pictures that we had in various emails, scattered across laptops, CDs, floppies, USB sticks, and memory cards and putting them all onto the external drive with the best of intentions of backing up to CDs. 

But I didn't.  And now I can't get to them.

Pictures of my daughter being born.

Pictures of my son's first birthday.

I posted to an internal list asking for help, and someone pointed me to StellarInfo.com.  I downloaded the trial version of their Stellar Phoenix FAT and NTFS Windows Data Recovery software.  Inside 15 minutes, the trial version confirmed that the files were still there and recoverable.

I purchased that sucker as quick as I could.   

Inside another hour, I had pulled the most critical files back down to my laptop's hard drive.  I got back all of the pictures, all of the presentations.  All my data.

Thank you, StellarInfo.