Missing

May 19, 2008 | By TonyfromOz |

by TonyfromOz

Five days ago, I had a catastrophic failure of my computer’s hard drive.

As much as we think we might be prepared for such an occurrence, we never really are.

As it happened, the sensation is one of puzzlement, thinking that, yes, this is a minor glitch, and I can recover. Then, a form of worry sinks in as as you realise just what might really be happening. Luckily, I have a sister, and a brother, who are both computer programmers. My sister was holidaying with our Mother who lives close to me, and she assisted me in the rebuilding process.

Luckily, I did not lose very much, as I have a good maintenance procedure in place that includes backing up of personal data. I did lose some data, and the biggest loss was that of digital photographs. In the old days, we always had the photographs themselves and the negatives. With digital cameras, however, the image is downloaded from the camera to the hard drive. From there I have two programs where I can work on the image, save any of the good ones, and then print the best ones. I did lose half those images, but my sister seems to think that the data might be recoverable from the now extinct hard drive, on a sector by sector basis. I was also going through the process of scanning all our old photographs into digital. Luckily, all of those were saved to disk, so I don’t have to go through that process again.

I like to save the good emails and I have a separate archive for that, so they were all lost too, recoverable I have hopes for. I also subscribe to the Mothers Car Care Forum, and I lost all my saved PM’s from there, again hoping they can be recovered.

I spent ten months converting all my long play records into digital. I have around 400 or so of them, and my good lady wife has a further 200 or so, most from her parents back to the dawn of LP music after the old 78’s, so some of her stuff is of more value than my cross section of the 60’s and 70’s. I found an absolutely excellent program for that. My sister the computer programmer had the program, but had difficulty working it out. She gave it to me when I despaired of ever regaining access to those LP records, as record players started to vanish, and oddly enough, the hardest thing to locate was diamond styli, and I had just installed the last one when the computer program turned up. It took me a while to work it out, but from that point, it became easier. The program allows me to plug the record player into the back of the computer, and then, as the record plays, it allows me to save the tracks, then to remaster the music, save the good tracks, and then to convert it to a smaller format for ease of saving to a drive using less space, and then find them a place to reside in a digital format. I converted them all to MP3 256, for quality purposes, and I have close on 12 GB of music. Luckily, I kept all of that on a dedicated hard drive, which I just keep in the separate hard drive caddy, so that was safe.
As for all my word processing data, all but half of my recent posts to this forum were saved, so I lost very little there.

I started using computers very early in their life during my time in the Air Force. My first PC was back in 1992, a new for the time 286, and since that time, I have had a further four progressively faster machines. This time, her advice was to upgrade, so now I have a 15 month old unit to replace the old unit, which was six years old and was just about ‘peripheraled’ to the max. The new one is way faster, with more memory, and double the capacity on the hard drive. I have become adept at construction from scratch, and even though I get the job done slowly, it is a methodical build that I can work best with. Luckily however, my sister was here and she did all the hard stuff in a matter of hours, and for the last few days, I’ve just been loading the minor software programs, and tidying up. I’m still working through things.

So, the lesson I learned from this is that there are symptoms, and with the benefit of hindsight, now, I am aware of what to look for, and to question why that has started to happen.

Another thing I learned is to back up all my data more frequently, no matter whether I think I haven’t done all that much to save or not, and I’m going to do that on a weekly basis now, and not just keep it for the monthly scheduled maintenance.

So, all going well, I’ll be back continuing with posts about the Kyoto series, probably on Wednesday morning.

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Tagged with computer, Computer Security, data back up, data recovery, hard drive crash |