Data Recovery

Did you know that ALL Hard drives will fail? Today there is a 100% failure rate for hard drives. Everything on the hard drive of the computer that you are reading this on will FAIL. It is not a matter of "if it will fail", but rather "what day of the not too distant future will it Fail"?

Do you have videos of your child's first steps on that hard drive? Do you have a picture of a graduation on it? Do you have some photos that you have converted from print to digital, and then thrown away the print? Do you have data that is important, like a will or a legal document that you want to be certain gets to where it needs to when it needs to be there?

Do you have a backup plan? In other words do you keep redundant copies of this invaluable information elsewhere?

For some of us that may be another hard drive (which too will fail) that backs up the data so that when the first one fails we can restore from the back up onto a new computer. ****Remember that this presumes then that you will restore that information, and then when the backup hard drive fails, you will then restore the backup from the original, and then when that original fails you restore from the back up and then when the backup. Most of us don't think that far down the road, but this is a great idea to consider when preparing your backup plan. Here is a representation of that process, and it could work, as long as two of your hard drives don't fail at the same time!

But what do you do if two fail at EXACTLY the same time? Well this happened to me, and I can tell you I felt absolutely sick. It was like my house had caught fire, and all of my photos had gone up in smoke, and there was no getting them back. I had over 25,000 photos in my backups, and about 1000 videos. Within the albums there were many photos that I would consider absolutely priceless. So what did I do? I found out about the processes that are involved in recovering data from hard drives, and put myself fully immersed and engaged in recovering all of those photos and data from these hard drives. It took a total of 68hours of scanning over 6TB of external hard drives, but I was able to get the bulk of my data recovered. Now I just have to go back through and re-organize the photos and videos in a manner that makes sense to me.

There is another option to this never-ending cycle of failures, and restoration. It is called the DROBO for a mac, and a RAID system for a PC.

I ended up getting the DROBO, as it offers me the opportunity to see the health of my hard drives before they fail. I can then swap out the failing hard drive without worrying about the data load balancing on the system (Drobo does that for me) and then swap in the brand new hard drive and continue with my work flow. All of the single redundancy is taken care of by the Drobo, and if I want double redundancy, I can set it up to take care of that for me too. The additional purchasing point was the fact that it uses thunderbolt technology, and the transfer speed is faster than any USB, so I can use it for my home movies as well.

Contact me to find out if your data is recoverable or not.

I can offer you an opportunity to recover your invaluable pictures!

Because  you can fail to plan, but no one plans to fail--except hard drives!