It happens all the time, hard drives crash without warning. But when someone loses all their data–it is sad.

This last week a graduate student came to our service center with a crashed hard drive. The user had dropped his computer and it would not start back up. The hard drive made clicking and grinding noises as we tried to recovery the data. Sometimes we can recover data using Onetrack software, but not this time because it was a mechanical failure.

The sad part of this story, the user had a lot of valuable data on the hard drive and he did not have any back ups of his data. The computer has a DVD/CD burner. USB keys are inexpensive and external hard drives are very affordable. Still no backups.

The cost of buying an external drive or blank DVDs is nothing compared to the time and effort that went into creating the irreplaceable data.

The user has opted to send the hard drive to Onetrack Data Recovery, where they will try to recover data. This option is very expensive and there is not guarantee that the data can be recovered.

Lesson: Back up your data!

Steps to take:

• Buy and external hard drive and back up your data. Check out this FreeAgent Drive.
• Burn data to CDs and/or DVDs.
• Store data at an off-site location. Store your photos for free at Kodak Gallery.
  

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