It's a Hard Drive life

There are moments in one’s life when they feel like a gift to humanity, there are other times when one feels like a natural born idiot. While I am defiantly a gift to some people this past week I felt much more like the latter.

It was a moment of sheer terror that caused my stomach to churn and my insides want to spill over my desk. My portable hard drive, the one I got on sale for $79 made a clunking noise. Not just any clunking noise, but a big gut wrenching clunk after clunk after clunk. I had just experienced a hard drive crash at a moment that really didn’t jive with my impeding deadlines.

How could “I”, the genius of all geniuses, scholar amongst the great, the one and only Bassam in my household manage to leave the one set of images on the portable drive and not having any of it stored on my main computer??? Well I guess I’m not that smart afterall.

I frantically searched the web, looking high and low for someone that can help me. Of course there were places in Silicon Valley, but that wasn’t going to help me. I then found Critical Data Recovery. They were around the corner from my office and wouldn’t charge me a penny if they didn’t recover my data. That sounded pretty good to me! So I decided to drop in and pay them a visit.

With busted hard drive in hand I zipped over to Critical Data Recovery. I tried to get a solid “yes we’ll fix your problem” from them but as Ali the lab manager told me, there’s no guarantees in data recovery but for the past 14 years he and his partner Tony do their best to recover client data and so far have had good results. I couldn’t believe I was leaving my data with two strangers. It’s such a personal issue in this day and age! I guess I had no option.

I gave Ali the drive and prayed that they would recover my data.

I had a few days to think about the situation at hand and decided I shouldn’t go cheap with my data backup again. I started a search for a solution that would work for me. I travel frequently so I didn’t want something too clunky and since i was going to carry it everywhere i go it had to be durable. I also wanted one simple plug that would connect me to my computer and power the unit as well, and I didn’t want to pay much more than $150 for it.

It was a pretty simple search. Only one company makes what I wanted. Iomega had just released the “eGo Leather Portable Hard Drive”, it’s small, about the size of a hip flask and can stand the drop from 51”, which believe it or not happens to me all the time. Best price I could find was $125 taxes included. I bought it. Unpackaged it, backed up my computer and waited for Ali to call with good news.

It was good news from CDR, Ali called to tell me that the drive was ready and if I wanted he can put the data on a new drive as well. I thought about bringing my Iomega drive to him but I decided to have a second backup of my data and bought a 500GB backup from him too.

What’s the moral of the story? First, don’t go cheap on your data backup. Second, if you get in a mess don’t worry, Critical Data Recovery will bail you out!