My Data Loss Horror Story

About 2 weeks ago, my backup drive failed. It wasn’t too much of a surprise; the 500GB dinosaur lasted me a solid 7 years before spinning to death.

But last Tuesday evening, I came home to find a most unpleasant surprise; the “Black Screen of Death”, if there is such a thing, as this most certainly had nothing to do with “Death”, but was really about hard drive failure on my main PC drive, less than 3 years old.

Devastation. Shame. Humiliation. Among my lost treasures include:

  1. 40-50 pages of notes compiled over 1 1/2 years for my fiction book
  2. My entire Guide to Blogging (sans the SEO/Promotional portion, which I’ve batted around in emails to myself)
  3. My entire collection of FX Tutorials, systems, documentation on my progress.
  4. Some content and administrative data I use for running my Website(s).
  5. A ton of customized and/or premium WordPress themes, tools, and plug-ins.
  6. 6 video projects in varying stages of completion.

I have no excuse for losing my valuable book notes or my guide to blogging (realistically its under 20 meg in Word documents and some images), except my own negligence in spending the time to find a way to securely back them up.

Adventures in Data Recovery

After a night of mournful whining, kicking my PC, yelling expletives that even made the dogs cringe, and getting drunk on homebrewed beer (Thanks for the booze, Scott!) I rose from bed the next morning slightly hungover, but realizing not all hope is lost yet.

Last Wednesday evening, it was time to get to work. With screwdriver parts, cables and CDs on every surface of my office and the bowels of my PC laying haphazardly on the floor, I acquired a clever boot disc filled with geek tools and utilities to hack my way into the drive, run some diagnostics, and attempt to recover the data.

Unfortunately for me, my luck with such things is never smooth sailing. The tests ended with a complete failure to boot from the HDD, blocking me from accessing any data. But the diagnostics did report it was able to read the entire drive without failure, leading me to believe the HDD is malfunctioning due to a software problem; maybe caused by a virus or something. All I know is my book and my guide are still sitting on that damn thing and I must get them off.

Starting Fresh with a New PC

OK, so I went and bought a new PC at Best Buy last week a couple days after this happened. And no, I didn’t buy a whole new PC just to replace a Hard Drive. That’s silly, like buying a new car because you needed a new muffler. I was planning on upgrading before the end of the year anyway, so this was my kick-in-the-ass to do so. With my new PC hooked up, I installed a hefty video card for gaming (priorities first, you know) and mounted the old drive into the new PC. Also put a fresh 320GB drive in the old computer… Merry Christmas, mom. :)

Onto new challenges. Did you know that a new hard drive is sold without cables? Seriously. The cheap bastards won’t include the cables to use the damn thing!

And, as my luck would have it, the cables in my old PC aren’t compatible to work in the new PC since the new PC uses a power supply with a 4-pin to SATA power converter. The old PC? Straight eSATA with no 4-Pin power connection. For Pete’s sake…

So after 10 minutes and $5.50 on Amazon, I’ve got both cables on their way this week. Once I get them I’ll hook this dinosaur drive up as a Slave in the new PC and either get the data off through the new PC, or at least run more tests and hopefully figure out a way to pull my documents off of it.

Securing my Work

While I’m still confident I can get my stuff back without spending $500 bucks with a drive recovery pro, I’m still kicking my own ass for such a stupid, stupid mistake. You never anticipate these types of things happening without notice, and I would toss the whole damn thing if I could just get my book and guide off of that drive. But such is life; everything pretty much deteriorates from Day 1, so the best thing I can do is keep my data from being lost again.

Once I recover my data I’m storing it in multiple places. I may try a Dropbox account, but I’ll also get a secure thumb drive exclusively for my writing.

What’s going to Happen with the Guide to Blogging?

Granted I can get it off of the drive, I’ll still be posting it to Market Misfit albeit later than intended (which was, um, around this week.) I won’t re-write this stuff, I’ve already invested over 3 months of thinking, writing, and editing this project and I simply have too many other things to do to write it all over again right now. (Namely, my books, my money-making sites, client projects and my job)

But all is not lost and regardless if I get the data back, the Guide to Blogging and Promotions will simply be the Guide to Promotions, coupled with some video tutorials which are probably preferred to reading, anyway.

I suspect I’ll keep losing sleep until I get my data back, and I should know by early next week if it’s going to happen.

*sigh*

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 at 12:04 am and is filed under General, Life in St. Louis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “My Data Loss Horror Story”

  1. Andy ScottNo Gravatar Says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 1:24 pm

    Have you ever considered using cloud based services (like Google docs) for your documents? Its not super nice for formatting but you can upload your docs and access them easly.

    As far as secure USB goes I’ve heard there is nothing safer then IronKey usb’s.

    I sure hope you can get to the data with the HDD as a slave. If not its infinitely frustrating knowing there is only a few 1′s and 0′s out of place and thats causing the rest to be locked onto those platters forever!

  2. AdamNo Gravatar Says:
    November 30th, 2010 at 2:35 pm

    Hi Andy, good to hear from you, and thanks for the comment.

    I’ve considered Google Docs but I’m wary of sticking over 1 1/2 years of writing in there if for any reason someone got into them. Many of the ideas are locked in my brain so even though it’s painful they are honestly better deleted than stolen… but obviously I need a better way to keep my data safe as well as secure. I’ve heard of IronKey, thanks for reminding me, I’ll be looking into that.

    Once I get the data back I’m going to figure something better out. Right now, holding my breath, waiting on my eSATA cables so I can abuse this drive enough to squeeze these docs off of it. Then I can sleep comfortably again.

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