It happened. A hard drive died tonite :(

[TVC15]

So long Alphabet Town (F:)

Music archive.  Some lost photos. Sniff. Lots of PSP archives. Sniff.

The most important stuff, the music, is all backed up, though

[Powerslave]

Tell me, do you keep your hard drives, or did you keep that hard drive on all the time?

[aoi tsuki]

Ironically, my external hard drive which i've had for about a year, died a few nights ago. i don't care about the downloaded stuff, but my thousands of photos from the past four years as well as my portfolio, and files i've had for nearly a decade are on it. What's really ironic is that i was setting up a Linux file serve to back it up.

TVC, i take it you haven't tried software like Spinrite to get it working again? i've got a copy of that if you need.

[DJ_Tet]

GetDataBack worked for me where all others failed, including SpinRite.

[TVC15]

There was nothing really important on it.  I might have lost a few things, but I am good about keeping backups.  It was kind of my "waiting room" hard drive - it was mostly recently downloaded stuff that had yet to be sorted, and I just sorted it a few days ago, so there were at most a couple gigs of video in there.

[aoi tsuki]

GetDataBack worked for me where all others failed, including SpinRite.

Thanks. i remember reading about that before i actually needed it. i'll definitely check it out.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

about a year ago I finally got serious about backups--it's easier nowadays than ever before, since you can pick up an external "mirror" HDD for $100 or so.

my music drive "died" about4 months ago, and rather than stare into the face of unfathomable existential depression, I just dragged-and-dropped the previous night's backup onto the new drive. Voila!

HDD crashes SUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCK, though. even if you haven't lost anything "critical," my condolences.

[Eel O'Brian]

I have 4 external hard drives, and even though I have never had a hard drive crash before all this talk of crashing has me a little worried.  What are evilbore's recommendations regarding backup and such?  Should I backup to DVD - and if so, what is the best (read: easiest) software solution for that?  And if not DVD disc backup, then what?

[ToxicAdam]

I am not a slave to the data on my drive. If it goes, it goes. All of my essentials are offloaded onto DVD's biannually.

[xnikki118x]

Our family computers died all the time when I was growing up. I remember it happening at least twice.

I recall on one, there was a C: drive and a D: drive. It stopped letting me open files from or save files to the C: drive so I just started using the D: one. I was probably in middle school, lol.

I hope you didn't lose anything important!

[Powerslave]

Slave to the power of data.