Yesterday was a bad day....

We had strong storms come through our area on Sunday and we lost power for a little bit. When the power comes back on both of our computer towers were fried. Took them into the computer shop today, the one with nothing on it is fixable while my computer with hundreds of my coin pictures, family pictures and important documents, gone. The hard drive and motherboard went. Sad that I just took all those pictures and now I have to do it all over again. :sigh:

Spring is here!

Oh wait, today it's snowing.....

 

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Deep sorrow Brother. I know how that feels. Best to ya, and thank the Lord you're safe.......

 

I feel your pain. When I sold one of my companies about a year ago, I took my office desktop with me (it was a really good comp). I set it up in my home office and had it there for about two weeks. Never got around to backing everything on it up. It fried after those 2 weeks. I lost a ton of everything. Luckily, most of the good pics and videos my wife had, but everything else--gone.

I invested in a $8 flash stick. I drag the "C:" drive into it every Friday now. Its worth the $8.

 

I am truly sorry to hear it, BT, and can only suggest backing up anything/everything important in the future. I keep SD cards as one would negatives, and each has been copied multiple times to multiple locations (external hard drives, USB drives, etc) out of the fear of losing the irreplaceable. It's a lot of hassle, but the peace of mind well worth the effort, or at least it is to me.

 

Are you sure that everything is gone on the hard drive? I've heard there is something called a hard drive reader that can access it. I don't know how it works. Maybe the repair shop already checked, but if they haven't.........

Chris

 

No backup?

 

Yes make sure you check into this, data can be recovered. First try shareware and if need be you can pay but it isn't cheap but data can be very important and worth it.

 

Happened to me 2+ years ago, power supply unit issue killed video card, motherboard and 2 drives. Drives died without any chance of revival. I had EVERYTHING on it with very partial old backups, about 80% of irrecoverable stuff gone forever.

After reading your post I backed up important stuff, found out I did not back up anything at all during last year.

 

If the drive shows signs of life when connected to power, then maybe. If it is dead when connected to power then it means the board is burned. Since modern hard drives come with unique firmware on the chip, even if you buy the exact same model and manage to put a working board with correct chip set on the drive it still won't let you access the data.

In this case the disks (plates) can be extracted from the drive and taken to data restoration lab, the price for this procedure will be extremely high.

 

Well, I'm sure that even a pig knows more about computers than I do. Thanks for the info.

Chris

 

Whew. OP is safe?

 

For the future, consider buying a wireless backup hard drive. You can get a couple of terabytes for about $300 (or less if you shop around). They will plug right into your router and can then be used by any computer on the same network. The set-up is fairly straightforward. I actually have a Western Digital 2TB as my primary backup and back that up to a Seagate 3TB drive. The WD crates the safe point of the Seagate and it was "set it and forget it" and I get an email each Sunday morning telling that the backup of my backup has completed. I use a program called ViceVersa Pro to d0 the backup to my WD drive. The back-up of the back-up might be a bit of overkill but it covers both my personal and business files so it was worth the cost. I did set the WD up first and then later added the Seagate system when the price point got to where I wanted it.

 

Thanks for the advise everyone. As long as I've owned a computer I've never had this happen so I never even considered backing anything up. I asked if he could pull the files from the hard drive and he said he would try it but it didn't work.

Just got to call my insurance company to see if they'll cover it to replace the one that went bad and the cost of fixing the other one.

On a good note my 8 1/2 month pregnant wife and I are okay!

Two more weeks until we welcome our little one into the world!

 

I copy all my cool stuff over to a different drive about once a month.
You can get a nice USB drive for about $60.

BigTee, I would get a second opinion on that drive. It's very possible the data is still there. How old was the system? As someone said, the problem can be finding a working system to plug the drive in to collect the data.

 

I also feel your pain man. It's happened to me also. Not with coin pictures though. In my case I had photos of my ex-girlfriend which I used to look at from time to time and then drown in sorrow. I was really into her and she broke my heart. You have to look on the bright side though. For me, losing the photos helped me get over her faster. At least you still have your coins!

 

If you're not technically inclined or tend to forget to back up, go to Backblaze.com. They have unlimited remote backup for about 5 bucks a month, and if your machine dies they'll send you everything on a hard drive for well under $200. All you have to do is make sure the app is running and you are connected to the internet, and it backs you up continually in real time.

 

My desktop computer has a mirror drive configuration. That wouldn't help if the drives were both fried at the same time though. I also have everything plugged into a fairly stout UPS.

 

when this happened to me I lost all the baby pictures from my sons first 2 years. Sent it to a forensics/recovery lab on the east coast, and about $450 later and a few weeks we got it all back. So the question is, how much is what was lost worth to you? Good luck and I hope you can retrieve everything.

 

Best thing (when weighing backup vs price) is an external hard drive. Most come configured to backup automatically. So you don't have to worry about copying everything.

 

I was at Sams club the other day and I asked one of the associates where the memory sticks were. He advised me to get an external hard drive because they were nearly the same price. The external drive really wasn't what I was looking for but I keep the recommendation under advisement.........