Backup Your Priceless Memories

Data loss can be a big problem for any business, but sometimes it's an even bigger issue for home users. Think about all the family pictures you keep stored on your computer, the e-mails between family and friends, the home videos, etc. In today's world, most home computers contain data that you simply cannot put a price on.

Just for a moment, while you're sitting there reading this, think about what's on your computer. Maybe you have digital pictures celebrating the birth of your baby girl, or maybe it's a graduation video. I'm asking you....no, I'm begging you....if you have anything like that on your system and it's not backed up, back it up today!

As the President of a large data recovery firm here in the U.S., you would think I'd rather talk about how WE can help you if you lose your data. While we certainly can recover data in 80% of the cases we receive, there's something more important here. A case we got in recently really hit home with how important it is to back up personal data.

A gentleman sent his crashed drive into us for recovery, and over the phone, the symptoms he was describing didn't sound good. The drive had been making some unusual noises, wouldn't spin up properly, and was not seen by the system. This is usually indicative of a major mechanical issue with the drive.

The man said he would pay anything.....anything at all.....no matter how big the cost, to recover the data on that hard drive. Obviously very emotional, he then informed our tech that the drive had pictures of his daughter who had been killed recently, and he had no backup of them. It was probably one of the most heartbreaking moments we've experienced here. This was not someone's Quickbooks file, or a years worth of spreadsheet data, this was someone's life. This was one of the few things this man had to remember his daughter. You simply cannot put a price on something like that.

After much work, we were able to get a good image of the drive and we eventually got to the point where we could attempt to copy the data over to our storage server. Everyone here had their fingers crossed, hoping beyond hope that we had been able to make it work. You can imagine our excitement as we did an image search of the recovered data and found thousands of pictures this man's daughter. It was an unbelievable moment, and his reaction was beyond words.

While this particular case had a happy ending, 2 out of every 10 cases won't be so happy. It's just a fact within the industry that around 20% of the hard drives received will not be recoverable, either due to excessive platter damage or severe corruption. Why even take the chance?

Please, go out and buy yourself one of the many cheap and affordable external backup devices available at just about any store. If you can afford it, buy two of them and keep them in two separate locations. This may seem extreme, but trust me, if you ever hear that "click of death" coming from your computer, you'll be happy to know your most precious data is safe and sound.