I was plugging my external hard drive into my lappy on friday to perform my usual weekly backup when BANG! Blue smoke a stench of burning silicone. Arse. PC is dead as a doornail. Mobo fried, gfx killed, ram shot to bits.
Removed the drive in order to try to recover a bunch of work data thats worth about 2 grand but no, drive is dead too. WHY WHY WHY oh god of silicone chips do this to me at this critical time?? DAMN YOU!
I have been quoted 280 quid to attempt to recover the data.
Note to all LB’ers, if you use a PC for work, backup every bleedin day.
Dunno much about the quote but you might be interested in this thing. It all depends what physical state your disk is in I suppose. Can’t vouch for it, just saw it in a magazine. :ermm:
Too late for you, but for some time my desktop at home has backed up its 320Gb hardrive to an external drive whilst we sit down and eat every evening. It takes about five minutes to copy the changed files, and a full backup takes about 90 minutes whilst out on a Saturday. Maplins currently have an excellent deal on an external 500Gb hard drive for £75 and if you automate it as I have done you can more or less forget about the backing up. It was a godsend when something on my mainboard died recently and I had to get a new system up and running.
BTW, the Maplin drive looks impossibly cool - black with a glowing orange bar!
I currently use Acronis - about £30 but very good if a little unintuative. There are free alternatives but of course you then don’t get support, upgrades, features or whatever - avoid Norton and similar “business” offerings. I once managed to get Norton to give me a full refund on the basis that their support was absolutly appauling for a product that didn’t work as advertised.
At work we use a company called ontrack to recover data from damamged disks. If the disk wont spin then these guys can re-mount the hard drive disks or plates on a new drive to get the data off. it is all done in a dust free airtight lab. Never had a disk they couldnt fix but is does cost-last one was near £1K for the work. Pm me if you want their contact details.
