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October 16, 2005
Worst Case Scenario
OK, I should know better, but let me spell it out again: B-A-C-K-U-P, backup, backup, backup!
Yesterday, I plugged my external Harddrive into my computer and no data was to be seen. The partition was still there, but it didn't seem to be formatted.
Not yet panicking, I booted up Linux, but the same picture presented itself. This drive contains all my digital pictures and my music library. Sure I did make a backup, but that was quite a while ago. I'd cry if I lost all that.
I started looking for a data recovery product and found Ontrack EasyRecovery™. This program was able to find all my data after a 4h search. Unfortunately it couldn't just fix the FAT, so I had to make room for all the 100+GB on my other drive. So after another 5h of data transfer, I had my data back and could start formatting my external drive anew. This time I'm using NTFS and hope that this doesn't get as easily corrupted as the FAT32 partition did. The formatting took another 3 hours and copying back the data yet another 3h. So just a couple of corrupted bits in the file allocation table of my drive cost me 15h to restore the data.
What to do to prevent this? Sure, backup is the best answer - but backing up 150GB is not easy. That's 10 DVDs! And one question I have is: Would this have happened with Linux, too?
Posted by marco at October 16, 2005 3:27 PM in Category
Comments
Yeah backing up 150GB ... problematic ...
However if this external hard drive contains all your picture, why don't you back it up once and back up the increments after ?
I have my photoarchive on 2 disks at home, and I back it up on DVD regularly :) though I'd feel safer if all my disks and dvd were not all in my appartment ... I need to get a bank box or something ...
Gilles
Posted by: McGil | October 21, 2005 3:34 PM