Back your hard drives up

Davec223

Davec223

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I know this threads have been posted before, but I am posting it again. Daughter managed to knock my external hard drive enclose off the tower of my pc yesterday, get home tonight power it up and all I hear is the head clicking, not good. So I have lost this years photos, which is a bit of a PITA as it is all the photos of my son from 2 months to 12 months:'( Well let my misfortune be a warning to every one else back up as soon as you download.

Off to search for free image recovery software and scan all my memory cards.
 
unfortunately the drive is sata and the tower is ide. I am sure it is the drive and not the enclosure. Anyway will have to wait until brother is down to look at it. but having spoken to him on the phone it sounds like its dead.
 
You can probably get the data off, it just might cost a fair bit (hundreds), you could look around for a professional service.
 
is there no where you can take it and get the items removed??? you know like they do in CSI (joke to the last bit)
 
no harm in at least trying it for your datas sake.. we had a USB maxtor drive at work that ticked like a b****r and wouldnt read but it read perfectly when connected inside a pc :)
 
Still take it out the case and put it in a pc. Power the drive up if you can see if the things still clicks.
 
i have a buffalo NAS , and that acts as a media server, back up drive. its locked in the cupboard in my lounge and backs up my PC ever two days . I use syncback. free software that you can schedule backup for . currently once a week.

every couple of months i take home my usb drive which is stored at work and i back up the NAS onto it .

works for me :thumbs:

i would think if given to the right people they would easily retrieve the data from the U/S drive. I've had a clicking drive before and it did turn out to be the enclosure/power supply.

Al
 
Sata drive docks are pretty cheap (c.£20); might be worth investing in one to enable you to connect the drive to the PC via USB.

If that doesn't work, many people have apparently had success with freezing the drive (in a freezer bag) for a day or so, which can apparently allow the drive to function long enough to pull all the data off it.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions, I will look into them.
 
If the drive was off at the time of the incident, then hopefully the heads are just out of place. The freezing trick should hopefully work.
If not, then it would probably need to be sent off to a lab for the heads to be moved back into place, or for alternative heads to be used. I would suspect that >90% of the data would be recoverable at a cost.
 
Sorry to hear about the missfortune! You should be able to get most of the data off at a cost though.

Before this happens again, something like Mozy is your friend - off site internet based backup, runs automatically every day so you never forget. First run is a b*tch though, can take weeks to complete, but after that, you know there is always a copy of your pics outside of your immediate vicinity.

Don't rely on another disk in the same house what with all the floods nowadays and the risk of fire etc.
 
I've been complentating building a PC with all the spare parts I have and doubling up all my HDD space over to it. But then I might as well have a off site backup if I was going that far. I'd be devastated if there was a fire.

Currently backup all pictures to another HDD on the same PC.
 
agreed regarding offsite backups, not sure i could be bothered waiting for 100Gb's to upload to mozy and the likes though. id just prefer to rotate an external drive out to my place of work.
 
i dont know if its the location, the rock structure below or the type of house (granite house built directly onto bedrock or something) but i've had to replace a lot of electrical equipment due to lightning. its essential i keep something offsite.

tv amps x2 , sky boxes x1, telephones x2 on about 3 seperate occasions.
 
I dropped my USB HDD a couple of years ago and it broke the motor, not the drive. I had to pay circa £400 to get the data off it (it was important stuff).

Since then I've kept copies in two different places.

lesson learned the hard way unfortunately.
 
Furtim said:
Sorry to hear about the missfortune! You should be able to get most of the data off at a cost though.

Before this happens again, something like Mozy is your friend - off site internet based backup, runs automatically every day so you never forget. First run is a b*tch though, can take weeks to complete, but after that, you know there is always a copy of your pics outside of your immediate vicinity.

Don't rely on another disk in the same house what with all the floods nowadays and the risk of fire etc.
Click to expand...

Agreed!
 
Pro service CAN retrive the data no matter what. Its just the cost thats the annoying part. A good reminder to anyone who doesnt backup their photos. A sad occasion indeed. Best of luck with whatever you decide to do next.
 
I have got a hard drive bagged up in the freezer at the moment, because of the exact same issue!

This is my last hope before I put it in the cupboard and have a long think about the cost of sending it off for recovery.

A lesson learned the hard way. It WILL happen to you eventually unless you back up (back up your back-ups too if they are important).
 
If you are going to go down the data recovery route, I would recommend Ontrak.

They are the best I've come across - usually if they can't get it back no one will.

Was the drive powered on at the time? If it was, chances are the platters have been physically damaged by the heads hitting them, which spreads debris over the rest of the it and makes data retrieval near impossible.

If it was turned off, you may be lucky and it might simply be the heads can't engage. It'll cost you though - it's about £150 for the diagnosis alone.


Hope this is of some use!
 
Davec223 said:
unfortunately the drive is sata and the tower is ide. I am sure it is the drive and not the enclosure. Anyway will have to wait until brother is down to look at it. but having spoken to him on the phone it sounds like its dead.
Click to expand...

have you tried recuva? are you on windows or mac? i might know some software that can help, also another thing to try is get a new hard drive enclosure - could be that is broken and not the drive. good luck!

i never leave my hard drives out, they get stuff put on them, then go in a nice, sturdy box well away from getting knocked or damaged. couldnt handle loosing so much data!
 
Ok, now for the pessimistic view.

I'd never put drives in the freezer. Honestly, knowing how disks work, what do you think this is going to do exactly apart from possibly inducing moisture onto your mainboard?

If the drive is ticking at poer up then it's probably a mechanical issue caused by shock damage. The ticking sound may well be the heads tracking across the disk and flicking back as it tries to read the sector info. If the heads are damaged (likely) then it's likely you are writing a grove onto the disk.

Ontrak are very good. They will inspect the disk, and have spare mainboards/systems to take the platters if required. Generally it's around £1 a Gb for the recovery these days.

On the stupidity side, we had a user say his hard drive had crashed. His laptop wouldn't boot.

We eventually worked out that he's decide to put in an older, bigger hard disk into his laptop and copy stuff onto that, but couldn't work out how, so he put his original disks back in without the locking screws.

Of course the disk fell out and started making noises, but still booted. he decided to remove the lid from the drive to see what the noise was, but didn't remove all the screws, still nothing a little brute force wouldn't fix. It must be stuck or something.

We worked this out after finally removing the drive by dismantling the laptop to get the drive out which had been jammed back into it's slot with a bent lid...
 
The other thing I do as well as backups is to split my photo's across different drives.

The raw files on one disk, the metadata etc on another and final jpegs on another. Everything is backed up weekly to an external nas, plus external usb disks
 
Byker28i said:
The other thing I do as well as backups is to split my photo's across different drives.

The raw files on one disk, the metadata etc on another and final jpegs on another. Everything is backed up weekly to an external nas, plus external usb disks
Click to expand...

That is a very sensible idea.
That way, you are duplicating your data, in such a way that any loss is minimal, but, not in such a way that the space being used for the 'duplicate' is not effective.

Pity my system does on-the-fly conversion from RAW to jpeg at viewing time! I don't do a lot of PP work in 3rd party apps (crop and colour stored in the RAW) :shrug:
 
I use lightroom, so raw imports to one drive, lightroom metadata to another, jpeg exports (i.e. finished shots) to a third.

Exports these days are twice, one at full res, one at 800x600 for web use. The web ones are zipped for quick upload and the originals deleted to save space.

Lightroom performs it's metadata etc backup once a week to another dedicated backup drive that also has copies of the mailbox's.

I figure to backup the only things which are irreplaceable, photo's, documents and mailboxes.
 
Davec223 said:
unfortunately the drive is sata and the tower is ide. I am sure it is the drive and not the enclosure. Anyway will have to wait until brother is down to look at it. but having spoken to him on the phone it sounds like its dead.
Click to expand...

can you get a sata caddy to check it out.. sorry cant find any cheapies on google..

if your drive is gone you at least have a second sata box to use as a backup
really sorry to hear of that loss..i had it years ago on a pc and use external backups as well...my caddy is called "rock" and is steel and really robust
i think they do sata...at least can be wired to run sata...
 
Just a thought, PC World do recovery for about £30 never used them but it may be worth asking yours gwh
 
sparkoss said:
Pro service CAN retrive the data no matter what. Its just the cost thats the annoying part. A good reminder to anyone who doesnt backup their photos. A sad occasion indeed. Best of luck with whatever you decide to do next.
Click to expand...

To stand this issue on its head, there are only two ways of permanently deleting data off a hard drive. Both methods are 100% guaranteed to make the data irrecoverable:

1) Sandblast the magnetic coating off the disk's platters.

2) Drop the disk in a vat of molten steel (a la Terminator 2).
 
Drilling a hole through would usually splinter the platters enough to make it non-viable to recover too
 
someone in the area will have a sata machine you can try it with

I use an external, NAS and raid :D
 
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