Before I dive into this week’s article, I wanted to call attention to my new picture. The last was three years old and customers have been telling me it needed to be updated. Today’s the debut of my new picture with updated title graphics. I’d enjoy your feedback.
Just yesterday I was preaching the benefits of data backup to a customer who lost all her data after her laptop was dropped. Her son accidentally knocked the machine from the table causing permanent failure. When I held the machine to my ear all I could hear was the telltale sign of catastrophic hard drive failure: “tick, tick, tick.”
This morning I woke to my network attached storage (NAS) device beeping. I checked the drive several times before realizing it had finally sensed failure and before permanent data loss had shut itself down. My NAS box is a shoebox sized piece with two internal hard drives setup for redundancy. In geek speak this is called a RAID. When data is written to the box, the same and identical data is copied to the second drive.
With my coffee brewing in the background, I pulled the face off the storage device and removed the internal hard drives. My guess was one of the drives had failed and the other was good; most RAID systems are setup to warn at the failure of one drive. After pouring a cup I schlepped both hard drives upstairs to my office and plugged the first into my home computer.
Drive number one failed almost immediately after being plugged in which was fine because that meant the second drive was the good one. I should never assume. What’s the old saying, “assumption is the mother of all… something?” Anyways, the second drive plugged in and easily recognized on my home computer; although, it didn’t go through the normal process I’ve grown accustomed and pretty much just started laughing at my agony.
Losing data is bad enough, but losing it on my backup drive could be detrimental. Most people who use a backup drive have data stored in two locations: their computer and the backup drive. In my situation I’ve setup all my computers and laptops to read and write from one central location. Rather than use the backup drive as a true secondary backup device, I’ve made it my central (and only) storage. When my NAS device fails, the computers in the house don’t know where to store data.
As of right now my semi-functional hard drive is attached to my home computer and a piece of pricey software is working to retrieve the stored data. This whole process started around 11AM and has not reached the 20% completion point yet. I would anticipate the whole process to complete sometime within the next 48 hours and am fully expecting most (if not all) of my data. I consider myself lucky.
My data backup plan is terrible and I’m lucky I have the tools and knowledge to get my data back. Had I been a customer at my own store I would have charged myself several hundred dollars based on the amount of time it’s taken. Having the drive attached to my machine prevents me from doing many normal tasks; rendering my computer pretty much useless.
I should have listened to my own preaching and invested in a second hard drive for strictly backing up my data. Data backup plans should include making duplicates and storing them in multiple locations. Critical business documents are about the only items I make duplicates. Unfortunately for me, all the pictures of my daughters are also on my failed NAS device. You know, if I succeed in getting my own data I may charge myself those several hundred dollars.
(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.