The importance of Backup

I recently lost a harddrive. I sent it to data recovery, and paid for 300 GBP, however, no data was recovered.

Unfortunately we could not recover the data from the hard drive due to media damage on the hard drive disk platters.

We imaged your hard drive disk platters 6%, however there was 94% we could not image from your disk platters.

We scanned the 6% image for any good data, unfortunately no good data was recovered from the partial image.

Initial problem on the hard disk was read/write head failure, although this did not cause any media damage to start with, it seems the hard drive was powered on for a period of time after the read/write head failure which caused media damage on the disk platters.

Your only other option for recovery is a forensic style recovery in our lab in London.

We don’t feel this is a viable option based on the low percentage your disk platters were imaged but if you need them to review your job let us know and I will put in a request to them (it takes them one day to review jobs, forensic cost for your size of drive would be around the £1000+vat mark).

I lost years of Family data and photos. One lucky thing is that I posted occasionally on social networks (including steem) some photos.

Two lessons learnt:

1. I should have backups, ideally more than one, on different harddrive. I should 've also stored photos/videos on Cloud apart from important files and data. Google Photos are free/unlimited if you choose a compressed format to store all the photos/data

2. Once the harddrive becomes faulty, don't try to play your lucks by plugging in. The broken headers may actually damage the disk platters which causes further data recovery to fail. Once it is faulty, unplug, and sent it to data professionals for data recovery.

3. Use a software to monitor the health of harddrive regular. Once it is about to fail, replace them.

4. Use RAID.

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Every little helps! I hope this helps!

Steem On!~
Computing and Technology

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