Today--my hard drive died

**kennethc** · 2nd February 10, 12:07 PM

Sorry to hear about your loss the clicking sound is the heads trying to get a fix sometimes this is caused by the actual harddisk firmware and not a fault, sometimes its caused by a shock, or electrical surge or just disk fail, However there is ways to get the data back, I used http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/index.aspx on a few occasions, I know that they only charge you to recover data if they actually can get it off they dont charge if they can't so might be worth a try, The most it will cost is getting it to them, but if you do ship put plenty of padding or ask your computer shop for hard disk boxes that they might have got when they bought disks,

Anyway I know how it feels to loose data, Happened once to me never again.

Ken

**Lyle1** · 2nd February 10, 01:06 PM

My hard drive crashed last year, and I know the sinking stomach feeling. Fortunately, I was in the habit of copying photos to a flash drive, and had another flash drive for a few other collections of files that were important to me. At the urging of the repair man, I bought an external drive and software to run automatic backups. When the new hard drive was found to be faulty and had to be replaced, I got a big smile when I handed the repair man my external drive.

**ali8780** · 3rd February 10, 10:09 PM

Thanks for the advice everyone! It has been really helpful. I got my computer back today and I'm in the slow process of setting everything back the way it was... The good news is that my sweet husband urged me to upgrade my memory and my RAM so that ought to make things more fun

We are definitely going to attempt data recovery, so hopefully that will go well... We decided that our pictures and my writing were just too important to us. Essentially, my second child's entire life in photos was lost--and that has just killed us.

Well, lesson learned, I just wish I wouldn't always have to learn it the hard way

**Foosinho** · 4th February 10, 05:55 AM

Originally Posted by ali8780

We decided that our pictures and my writing were just too important to us. Essentially, my second child's entire life in photos was lost--and that has just killed us.

Usually photos are the last thing people think about making backup copies of (way behind stuff like legal documents), but they're the loss that hurts the most. I'd suggest making digital copies of non-digital photos around your house (and then back those up like you do your other critical data) so that you have replacements in case of some kind of "natural disaster / act of god". Hard drive failure isn't the only threat to your valuable documents/photos.

It was the loss of the photos that made my wife cry, not the other documents. Thankfully, there were copies on other machines of some of the most important photos. We still lost a lot, but it wasn't total.

Good luck. Ask friends and family if they still have copies of any photos you emailed them, and consider using Picasa or Flickr to store copies of the sentimentally important photos. (One of my wife's friends had saved every single photo that had ever been emailed to her. She just zipped up the folder and emailed it back. It's all been uploaded to Picasa, just-in-case.)

**Southern Breeze** · 4th February 10, 11:10 AM

OUCH! I definetly feel your pain. Mine crashed christmas day and I lost a lot of pics I thought were on cds. Fortunatly everything else that was importantwas backed up.

**ali8780** · 6th February 10, 12:41 PM

I got in touch with some one who was able to restore all of my information for --wait for it-- FREE!

I definitely feel blessed

**Paul** · 6th February 10, 12:57 PM

Poor you! Hope everything goes alright
I really need to install a second hand-drive on my desktop computer for backing up... I think you've just influenced me to!

**skauwt** · 6th February 10, 01:22 PM

im a other back up convert

....after reading this topic Ive decided its best to back up all my photography the thought of losing all my photos scares me to be honest ,so tomorrow im off to buy a external hardrive and keep it in a fireproof box along with other important items