Plink!

We've all read about this. Maybe even it's happened to you. The hard drive crash. I got my first 10MB hard-drive back in the "old" days (1990?) and hooked it up to my Atari ST. In the past 13 years I've only had one hard drive go bad, and that was simply an over-heating problem. Maxtor promptly sent me a new drive out and I've been good ever since. Until this past weekend...

The 60GB Maxtor in my wife's machine (actually, the one used to backup important stuff) died on Saturday. Not sure exactly what happened, but when the drive powers up, it makes sort of a "plink" sound right about the time the head is supposed to unpark. The really bad part is that (a) I'm not sure exactly what was on this drive (it was shared and I threw stuff on it too) and (b) it was the only place I kept all of my digital pictures. Oh yeah -- and when I pulled the drive out it had a warranty end date printed on it: Aug 2003. Six weeks ago.... <sigh>

I backed up the digital camera pics to CD back in Jan 2002 -- 18 months ago. I'm not sure exactly how much I've used the camera since then (it's an aging 1.1 megapixel camera), but I know I *have* used it. There's a data recovery place about 20 minutes from where I work. I'm going to give them a call and see how much it might cost to recover the info. I know it's not going to be cheap.

Heed this: A hard drive crash *will* happen to you. You *need* a good backup strategy -- now! Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now. Take a moment now to think about what it would be like if you got up tomorrow morning and your hard drive was toast. How much would you loose?