Bye, Bye Data. A Dead Hard Drive Story.

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Backup is not something as a home user that you think about everyday. I sure didn’t, until I had hard drive trouble. Then you start mentally listing all of the important documents and photos that you are about to lose. After I resigned to the fact that my Hard Drive was toast, I went down to Best Buy and bought another one. I got a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. It was only $149.00 (after rebate) for 200GB. So I brought it home and removed the old dead drive and installed the new drive. It worked but there was a problem. The new drive was an ATA-133 drive and I only had a ATA-100 drive controller. Another problem is that you need a ATA-133 controller to break the 137GB barrier. So Back to Best Buy. They were sold out. I then went to CompUSA to buy the controller board. Got the new drive and the new board in and am all ready to go and the new drive stops spinning. Back to Best buy to return the drive. I now have the new new drive in but the ATA-133 is not working. Back to CompUSA to exchange the ATA-133 card. Ok so now I have the new new 200GB drive and the new new ATA-133 card. Everything works perfect I have it up and running in a few minutes.

 

So now the moral of the story is to backup your data. This is hard for users to do because they don’t know what to do or where to backup the data. One cool feature of Digital Image Pro Suite 9 is an backup utility that will remind you to backup and allow you to back up to a number of different locations and media. So now I have no excuse not to back up my stuff. Another aspect to backup is off-site storage. The scenario is that you spend time doing all of the right things and backup your important memories and documents to a CD-Rom. One night your downstairs neighbor has a fire that burns down your apartment building. All of your backups are destroyed. The solution to this is to create 2 copies of you CD’s and send one copy to a relative’s house for save keeping. This will ensure that you always have a backup. I hope that you don’t lose your data like I did before you start a good backup strategy.