This has been the month to end all months of backup hard drive failures.  Between my two stores I’ve counted seven failed hard drives and three broken USB key drives.  The folly is that the drives weren’t old and each contained data that couldn’t be reproduced.

I’ve been harping the benefits of data backup for years and unfortunately the drives that failed were the failsafe backups.  This week I wanted to touch on a favorite old topic of mine and rewrite an article I wrote about two years ago.  This time I want to change a few stories and modify my original suggestion a bit more.

I remember visiting one customer while she was attending college; long before either of my stores.  She’s now graduated and is traveling the world – snapping pictures and writing stories about her travels.  Years ago I made the suggestion she purchase a backup drive to preserve her memories and work in case of catastrophic failure of either the camera or laptop.

Two weeks ago my phone rang from a number I wasn’t familiar with.  When I answered I could hear a faintly familiar woman’s voice through mostly crying.   After a few minutes I finally made out who I was talking with and then figured out that all of her pictures she took while on African safari were gone.  Her backup hard drive had failed.

We put together a plan to re-assemble all of her data based on her backup scheme.  Turns out she kept a redundant backup of her drive without knowing.  Rather than delete pictures from her camera cards, she kept purchasing new and archiving the old.  She would copy from the card, to the computer, and then onto the backup drive.

Retrieving pictures from Africa was a no brainer and meant reading the data from the camera’s memory cards.  In a matter of hours all her pictures were reassembled into her picture folder.

Last week a new customer came to me with a failed backup drive in hopes I could magically retrieve the data.  As with most drives that come through my door, I disassembled the enclosure and plugged the hard drive portion directly into my computer.  The telltale “click, click, click” told me instantly the drive had seen its last day.

As I told this customer her data is completely gone her facial expression went from hopeful to panicked.  She explained that six years of tax documents, business documents, and pictures was contained on the failed drive.  She had to retrieve the data to keep her business inline and the drive I had in my possession was the only known location of that data.

While we were talking I suggested she talk to her accountant to see if he retained a copy of her QuickBooks data.  I also suggested she look through various files on her home and office computers to see if any of the data was perhaps duplicated.  Later that day she assured me none of the data had been duplicated and her accountant had deleted her backup files.

I had also given her the name of a company that specializes in data recovery from failed hard drives.  She told me the price the company representative quoted was close to $3,000.00 and that it’s probably not worth it to retrieve the data.  Her idea was to simply purchase a second backup drive to insure more redundant archives.

I like the idea of having a second and third location for backup files.  Single locations aren’t very secure unless measures are made with redundant hard drives.  However, for a minimal expense a second external hard drive can be added and either carried offsite or placed in a safe.  From my experience, the key to data backup is having multiple copies in multiple locations and faithfully making backups.  A $50.00 investment can save millions in headaches later.

 (Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner.  You can call him directly at (978) 919-8059) or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.