A Thing We Never Learn

Well, the never-expected but always inevitable happened: my hard drive crashed. No, not my internal drive, thankfully - that one I monitor closely for any odd behavior, and I do try to back up my data. Though I admit I don't Ghost or create any mirror of my drive so that if it were to crash - and it will, that is just a matter of time and my ability to get a new computer before it does - I would lose my software, bookmarks, preferences, and that kind of thing.

Nevertheless, it was a relatively new 2 terabyte Seagate drive that failed with absolutely no warning. Well, no, I take that back. It had been taking longer and longer to read the drive on bootup - but I assumed that was because I had a lot of video on it.

And here is a word of caution, as more and more of us have HD cameras, whether for work or for play. They take a tremendous amount of space, and for some reason, as files are never clumped together as a unit on a hard drive but dropped in pieces on sectors of the drive, and then reassembled when they are called for, they seem to tax a drive during this read/write process. For this reason, video houses used to always use Raid arrays on SATA drives as the read/write speeds were faster and the Raid arrays striped the video files in a way that was easier to recover and less likely to be lost.

But back to my HD failure: there had been no clicking or whirring or any signal, other than the slow access, that anything was amiss. I had a couple of very large file groups on this drive - it was dedicated to some heavy video clients.

Then the day came when I simply could not access the drive at all. More accurately, the drive was acting very strangely - showing me subfolders, but not showing me the contents. Except once in a while. But when I tried to move the contents or the folders off that drive and onto a safe harbor, the process would typically hang up.

I finally noted that when I started the drive, it was making the dreaded failure-to-spin-up noise. Not clicking in this case, which is very typical of a failing drive, but laboring, as if perhaps the power supply had failed or was failing, and the drive was spinning but not at full power, or perhaps with interrupted power.

So what do you do in a case like this? Your objective, clearly, is to recover the data from the failing drive and get it onto a working one.

There is always the option of taking the drive to a data recovery specialist. There are always a few near where you live, and so far, I have not found anyone who is incompetent to do the job - it's more a question of how much he or she will charge.

So I opted for a few home remedies before I went the pay for service route.

First, I put the drive in the freezer. I've written about this before; it's simply the properties of tiny bits of wire that are heating up: they expand and contract and sometimes, they will break as a result, or move slightly. Sometimes, just getting the drive very cold can contract the metal sufficiently to break whatever contact has been made that is causing the trouble. It's not a permanent fix, remember, as once the metal heats up again the problem will most likely come back. But it can give you enough time to move your data. Then if you're really curious, you can open the drive and see if you can spot the problem.

In this case, the freezer method worked - sort of. It gave me a few minutes of drive access, but not nearly enough to solve my data recovery issue. Moreover, I wasn't entirely sure that the real problem lay in that type of problem, as when I accessed some folders I knew contained data they were displaying as empty.

Next step: a good data recovery program.

These can be quite expensive for pro versions; but I found a very highly rated program for about $50 called Stellar Phoenix Home. Downloaded, installed, and essentially, prayed that the bad drive would show up as scannable. It did, and I set the program to scan the drive. It took a long, long, long time - and it was clear from the behavior of the software that the problem lay in bad sectors on the physical drive. It would reach a certain point in the scanning process and hang for a lengthy period of time, then finally resume.

Once the scan was complete, I was shown the folders and files that the software had recovered - it was virtually the entire drive. Next step: move the data to a new, trustworthy hard drive. I had purchased a Western Digital Passport for this purpose, as I have two others and they have been reliable to date. This transfer process was again, lengthy, but not nearly as long as the scan.

In the end, my files were recovered, moved to the new drive, and are accessible.

Next step: get a backup drive for all important data and set it to an automatic backup on, say, Sunday evenings, or some other time when I'm not likely to be using my computer extensively. While anyone who uses a computer a lot warns you about this, even professionals don't always back up drives as often as they should, or check their integrity.

I have learned to save some very important data - such as finished video projects - on offsite "cloud" applications. These will cost a little money once you've reached a certain volume, but it's well worth it to know that your data is not just saved somewhere other than your home or office, and will also be backed up by the service - as in, that's what they do for their fee.

It's an old story, I know, but it always bears repeating!

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