76 Comments For This Post

1. larrywcox Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 4:37 pm

   Nightmare on a lonely highway.
   I am a data admin and I travel all over the US doing server upgrades and day to day maintenance. My nightmare happened about 3 months ago on a lonely road in West Virginia. I had stopped to buy gas and get a bite to eat at the all in one rest stop/gas station. I got a call from my boss to upload a presentation to our sharepoint server. So I opened up the trusty thinkpad and pulled the file off my USB harddrive. I could not get a really good signal in the car…so I put the laptop and drive on top of my car to squeeze out just a tad bit more EVDO. I was successful at getting the file posted….but I was not successful in putting the USB drive back in my briefcase. Long story short….I pulled out on the highway with a 80gig USB drive on top of my car. I caught a glimpse of it when I pulled out…just before it hit the pavement in 1000 pieces.
   So…I could use a new drive. My story might not be about a tragic data lose or server crash…it is a simple story about a USB Drive and a West Virginia highway.

   Thanks for the contest….good luck to everyone that enters.

   Larry

2. nourisha_w Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm

   i was a senior in college working on my senior capstone which was a magazine prototype to complete my magazine major. i had designed and wrote stories for a 32 page publication that took me an entire semester to finish. two nights before it was due i was in the mac lab on campus at Drake University (go Bulldogs!!!) and the computer just crashed. no warning, just the bomb of death. at first i thought it was a prank since we had students who thought it was funny to send the bomb screen to others in the lab. i knew it was real when other students randomly screamed in horror. i was in the process of redesign three spreads and updating all the helpful edits i had gotten from my editors. all was lost. the computer lab was closed for two days and i was forced to complete my project at kinkos in downtown des moines. it costs me $120 and i had to start all over on my redesigns and edits. thankful i didn't have to start from scratch but i missed my deadline by an hour and had to take an entire letter grade deduction because of it. the thought of mac labs still makes me cringe!!

3. David Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 5:31 pm

   When I started with computers in the DOS days, I read everything I could about them. The first thing every author said was to Back Up Your Data! I read that enough that I thought it sounded like a good idea I've been religiously backing up data for almost 20 years now. Now, I have more than can fit on my DVDs, plus all my backups are at home. This would work great to allow me to keep a copy of my data with me as I travel!

4. Bryan Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 5:57 pm

   My worst data loss scenario definitely occurred during college with my Sony Vaio laptop which did not have a built-in CD/DVD drive. The hard drive was on its last legs and I had no way to transfer a majority of my media as thumb drives were did not have the same massive capacity as they do today. Fortunately school work was safe but I could have definitely used one of these Free Agent portable drives back then.

5. Desi Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 6:16 pm

   I stayed up all night organizing a semester's worth of notes for a final exam which would amount to 100% of my grade. As dawn began to break and everything appeared to be in order for my test which was in a few hours, my computer began acting weird. Then without any notice poof! Everything was gone.

   This nightmare has made me a backup evangelist. My friends just don't get it, but it only take one incident to make you see the light.

6. Ray Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 6:18 pm

   (Can I post the same one I posted at The Gadgeteer?)

   This actually happened just a few days ago. I was backing up my media files (audio/video/images) one night and when I woke up next morning, I find out that all the folders were empty! I go through the usual stuff for about an hour – unplug the USB, unplug the hub, restart the PC, all sorts of things, etc. – and nothing seemed to work. I started freaking out and thought about the last time I backed up on optical discs… months ago. I did another restart, and thought about one other thing I forgot to try out: unplug the external drive. Thankfully that did it, and it made me realize I need to be religious with redundant backups. Again. You know, just in case.

7. ssschmidt Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 6:23 pm

   About 2 years ago, the business that I work at shifted software. The software that they shifted to didn't produce reports in the sam format as the previous software. So the Manager wanted me to create a similar report. I jumped right in using an Excel spread sheet. The only way I could come up with was to manually enter each day's numbers. The numbers came from 3 separate reports each. The tasking came in July. It took me 5 days to input the data to date. The report information was continually entered until the end of the year, at which point the report was determined to be obsolete. About 5 months later, the Manager requests that I regenerate the report. To my chagrin, the terminal I had used to store the spread sheet had experienced a hard drive failure. No back up solution was implemented. So, I was a very unhappy camper. Since that time, I now have flash drives of 8gb to 32gb that I carry with me. In addition to some cloud based storage.

8. Chris Mees Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 6:26 pm

   Just before last Thanksgiving, my wife's desktop started to give her some problems in that it would reboot or hang up multiple times during the day. For a week she ran antivirus/anti-malware/anti-spam/anti everything. Finally after about a week the hard drive would not boot up. Because she had been busy cleaning her system she had not copied/backed up any of her data.
   I dropped it off at Best Buy. They failed. Their recommendation was to send it off site to their specialist. Problem was the cost could range from $300 to $1800 to recover the data. She really needed the data, it had personal and business information that was not backed up any where else. So we sent it off to the specialist.
   As you can probably guess, they were able to fully recover every thing, but at a cost of $1800!! Needless to say, that was her Christmas and Valentines gift. She now has the data on 3 different drives (all older drives from past computers), but we need to set up a regular back up drive and system. Once again, you can know what you should do, but if it is not easy/a habit, you are likely not to do it and have to pay the price later!!

9. Pruitt Hall Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 6:30 pm

   Worst data loss event is easy for me…1991 in Florida when I was Systems Manager for a large manufacturing company running AS/400's (mid-range systems). One of them had a 'tri-pack' set of 3 Seagates (how timely!) drives and the center one went out. Problem was, data was across all three drives…that was a fun, fun re-construction. Taught this old sys admin we truly are 'only as good as our last backup'.

   Lesson learned.

10. Micheal Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    My WORST data loss was our company Exchange server. Bad week for everyone. However, my own personal data loss has not happened yet! Thankfully I've not had anything bad happen, but I honestly have nothing in place as far as a backup plan. Having a FreeAgent would hopefully resolve my bad habit.

11. Tim Adams Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    My worst data loss experience actually turned out better than I could have hoped for. I was on vacation and before going to bed my notebook computer hard drive began the "click of death". It died and I spent a restless night fretting over tons of data that I had not backed up. (I could have really used a portable hard drive!). In the middle of the night I was awakened by the idea of using my old 5 GB iPod to try to save everything. I booted the computer, emptied the iPod, copied over everything I could think of to it, and the computer proceeded to die as I finished. With a relatively happy ending, I don't know if this qualifies… but my data on the computer was certainly lost. The iPod didn't hold everything, so a larger portable hard drive would certainly be a blessing!

12. Al Johnson Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 6:44 pm

    I have yet to have a major loss. I want to be ready for one.

13. DSB Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 6:47 pm

    Love to get one of these – my 6 year old lap top did pack up once but I did have a backup for my important stuff, so I survived. This would definitely help cause no one knows the future.

14. Hai Vu Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 7:10 pm

    My worse data loss happened when my 500GB external HD hit the dust and took with it more than 300GB worth of DV-quality family videos, 30GB worth of family pictures which spans several years. I now have a replacement, but still looking for a backup drive, I will probably looking for something like the Drobo.

15. Andy S. Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 7:15 pm

    Back in 1999 (or so), when Napster was still a dependable source for illicitly acquiring MP3s, I managed to lose my entire music library thanks to a hard drive failure. It was only a few gigabytes of music at the time, but given that everyone was in the habit of encoding at 128kbps, a few gigabytes was actually quite a bit of music. Between re-ripping my own CDs and re-downloading (over dial-up, no less) what I couldn’t rip, it took me a long time to recover all of my lost music, and that experience has been sufficient to teach me to keep proper backups at all times.

16. Naomi Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 7:50 pm

    The worst data loss, overall, was when my husband left my digital camera in the stroller at the zoo and someone swiped it. But the worst computer crash was, thankfully, my only computer crash when the HD of my old goosenecked iMac ceased to be AND somehow fried the external HD, too. Luckily I had just backed up all of the photos but everything else was a loss.

17. Tammy Stone Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 7:52 pm

    I bought a new HP this summer. My dream computer! Save for a long time for it and ordered it the exact way that I wanted it built. It took weeks to get it and when I did I fell in love. And then I was sad. After installing all of my stuff and setting up all of my business spreadsheets it started acting funny.

    It seemed like heat issues so I called HP and after a bit on the phone trying to troubleshoot, the decided I needed to send it back. They reminded me to back it up and I figured I do that as soon as i got home from my shop on my network hard drive. The computer didn't make it! It died soon after the phone call. I couldn't boot it up at all. Got home and it still wouldn't boot.

    I cried becasue I knew I lost all of the business information and I would be putting all of the year's information back in manually AGAIN!

    I now back up on my network drive every night! It would be great to have the smaller drive so I could back up at work everyday.

18. Hai Vu Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    I used to own a 500GB external HD which I stored more than 300GB worth of DV-quality family videos, 30GB worth of family photos that span several years. I also use that drive to backup my 120GB MacBook HD. One day, that drive just hit the dust without any warning (the SMART status was just fine a few days earlier).

19. Hai Vu Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    Sorry for the dup. After the first post, I did not see my comment, so I posted again.

20. David Andrade Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    I am a teacher and had just spent a lot of time working on presentations and documents for my classes. The files were kept on the schools server. I never backed them up myself. Then, the next day there is a server crash. I figured my files would be on the server backup, except that didn't work the night before. All of my work (over 8 hours of working) and files was gone. Even the files that were on there before and should have been on a previous backup were gone. I now do my own backup. A nice new drive would be great!

21. John Kes Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    Some time ago I only did manual backups – mostly of my digital pics. I forgot about my Quicken data because it automatically prompted for backups. Silly me, I had it back up to a different partition on the same drive. Hard drive failed, and I lost several years worth of financial data . I think all of my TurboTax data disappeared too.

    I now do automated backups on all of my stuff using a Western Digital MyBook 250GB drive. This drive is getting kind of sketchy, so I am looking for a new external drive. It sometimes freezes for days, and misses automated backups.

22. Chuck Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:28 pm

    I've been relatively lucky – Other than a couple of SD cards that have gone bad, my biggest loss was from failure of a PocketPC battery.

23. mikekarr Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:33 pm

    I was was a psuedo sys-admin for a real estate company. I managed the exchange database with all of their client lists on a homemade server with drives that were mirrored and striped. The hard drives went bad and the backup turned out to be corrupt and they were not happy with me that week. We recovered most of the data from one of the realtors who had a little Pocket Rex contact manager.

24. Matt Banks Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:34 pm

    Worst data loss has to be from a lighting strike to the power line outside my house that killed my laptop, desktop, and external hard drive all at the same time. All data was 100% gone and nothing could get it back.

25. Keith K Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:49 pm

    It happened while trying to upgrade my first PC. I had purchased a new larger hard drive to add capacity. Unfortunately the master/slave concept had not yet been explained to me. I reformatted on the new HDD but when I went to check on the original drive I chose the format it at the option and lost the entire drive.

    Rookie move, I know, hasn’t happened in a decade or so.

26. DDavis Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    I'm still working out the details of this one but… recently upon booting up my Sony desktop the computer just kept rebooting never even making it to the welcome screen. Safe mode worked but only to a point. Upon reinstalling Windows I got the message "hard drive failure imminent > please replace drive" Not a message anyone wants to see. Fortunately, I was able to boot up the PC and back up most of my necessary files . I'm now in the process of waiting for an adapter which will allow me to use the new SATA deive with my old IDE computer.

27. Phil B Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 9:02 pm

    My first generation iMac died about 4 months after I got it. No problem since the iMac is still under warranty. Bring it into the local Apple store and the Genius tells me the hard drive died. I figure no problem since I had been doing weekly backups to DVD. Go through my backups and realize that the most recent usable backup is 5 weeks old. I bought a external drive that day and set up Retrospect to backup every day.

28. TWC Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 9:17 pm

    To date the worst crash I've had was the loss of a presentation I had set to present to a large commercial insurance agent we were pitching to work with our company. Laptop, check……projector, check……files…..uh oh. Nothing like rambling on and on with no visual references!

29. Jim Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    Hi Judie,

    Here's my worst data loss story: I used to carry around, to work and school, an older Toshiba Satellite laptop. One night, I parked my old gray Honda Accord in the driveway outside my apartment, and in a hurry to get in out of the cold, left the Toshiba in the car.

    The next day, I walked out on the way to work, and my driveway was empty.

    My Honda was stolen, probably for parts, right outside my place. My laptop containing all my saved documents and music, was also gone. I remember that I was pretty livid. If I'd remembered to back up all my data, as we all should, I would have saved myself time and headaches.

    I hope I win!

30. Peter Schott Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 9:43 pm

    I was doing a database update and we had renamed some tables in the process, but that was an unknown to me. I generated the sync scripts and ran them. Shortly afterwards, the developer asked where all of his data was. I told him that it was in the table that was just dropped. When he asked about our backups, we found out that the database was not part of the backup scheme. Through lots of digging, we found a backup of the database and were able to get the data back, but it was a pretty painful lesson to learn about the difference between renaming a table and dropping/creating new ones. Not quite as bad as (e.g.) Livejournal.com, but it was something I have no desire to ever repeat.

    Realted to this giveaway, I'd love to keep a copy of all of our pictures, videos, etc so we can keep a true offline archive somewhere. We've taken quite a few over the years and I'd hate to lose those.

31. Jordan Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 9:46 pm

    Sounds trivial, but my worst data loss wasn't business-oriented, but rather a personal loss. I had a Western Digital Passport drive that had been acting a little funny but I carried it with me wherever I went to supplement my 320 GB MBP hard drive. I was working on a freelance project and needed to free up some space on my computer, so I grabbed the only non-work data that I had – a video compilation that I had been working on for months as my dad's father's day gift – and moved it over to the Passport drive, deleting the original files. When I got home to my larger 2TB external drive, I plugged in the Passport drive to back up the files, my laptop hung and after several reboots and attempts to repair it, I realized that I had fragged the Passport drive. To my dismay, I discovered that the raw video files that I had painstakingly converted from analog tapes were also on that drive. Basically, three months of work went down the drain and on Father's day I had to explain to my un-tech savvy father that I had TRIED to do this great thing for him, but had to prioritize work over his gift and ended up destroying it. They don't make Hallmark cards for that.

32. stevenshytle Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 11:13 pm

    Let's see: Lost job two months ago. Created a variety of current resumes. Saved to jump drive without backup. Hard drive corrupted. Time to retype resume

33. Paul Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

    Lost most of our family's pictures that we had spent weeks scanning into the computer. Wife is still mad at me.

34. Daleeh Says:
    February 4th, 2009 at 11:55 pm

    Although not a direct “PC backup” disaster, the worst I can recall was several years ago when I left my Palm in my carryon bag in an airline overhead compartment and the power button was continuously pushed! In past years I had always printed out all my addresses before travelling or I would have my laptop with me also, however this time I thought ” I;ve never had a problem, so why waste the paper” and of course I wasn’t carrying my laptop on this trip. AARGH!

35. ssschmidt Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 12:24 am

    Hmm.. My post didn't show up. Again:
    I was tasked by my employer to generate a report for a new software system. The new system didn't "present" the information that he wanted in the same way as the previous version. I fire up excel, and build a flat base to contain the information, add in a few formulas' and then have the fun of entering daily data for about 5 months. I keep the file up to date from then on. I am then told that the report I've been making for him is no longer necessary. Fine. Then, about 2 months ago, he asks me where that report is, and how long it would take me to make it up to date.

    Imagine my anxiety when the PC I had used had recently been repaired due to a hard drive failure.
    Now, I tend to carry an assortment of USB thumb drives ranging from 8GB to 32GB. And yes, some of the drives are redundant.

36. Brandon Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 12:27 am

    I've lost so many things on computers its not even funny, but I would have to say the worst one was where I accidentally wiped a drive clean to do a reinstall and hadn't saved a copy of our last 2 years of tax returns. Naturally that sucked pretty bad, especially when we were just starting the process of buying our house.

37. Civisi Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 12:43 am

    Before I implemented a backup hard drive, my primary hard drive crashed. It would not boot into Windows (Win 98) and I had no way to recover my data. I replaced the drive and started over, thinking that all my data would be lost forever. I then purchased an IDE-to-USB adapter, plugged in the drive, and to my amazement, I was able to recover everything! USB to the rescue!

38. Mark Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 12:58 am

    My worst data loss experience actually happened at work. I worked for several years in technical publications department for large manufacturer. We used desktop publishing software to create our manuals, and saved the files on (first) Iomega 100MB Zip discs (remember those?), and later switched over to CD-R's – this was late 90's and early 2000's. Several years later, and several hundred Zip discs and CD-R's later, we finally got several external hard drives and went to migrate our data off the discs to the hard drives. We managed to retrieve most of the files, but ran into several Zip discs AND CD-R's that we could no longer read, or in some cases had corrupted files due to bad sectors. We lost several GB's of DTP files as a result, and in some cases, had to completely recreate the "lost" files.

    Today, the department has the files on a SAN (with backup policy in place), and they are also backed up on 4 different external drives for additional insurance – we have already benefited numerous times from this approach.

    That experience has spilled over to my personal life – I back up my personal PC's about twice a month (or more frequently, depending on amount of new file creation) on multiple external drives.

39. Neil Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:00 am

    During a set-up of a dual-boot system, to test vista, I accidentaly formatted the wrong drive. This caused me to lose all my pictures and videos stored. Needless to say, I have not attempted to set-up a dual-boot system again.

40. Mike Cane Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:28 am

    Me! Me! Me! Wait … then she'll have my frikkin address!

41. Paul Little Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 2:15 am

    I owned three maxtor Diamond max nine drives… and all of them failed within four months of each other! What makes it worse is that it was the boards that burned up, so I still have the drives… with my data… but no boards to retrieve it!

42. Judie Lipsett Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 2:53 am

    No worries! We have to approve comments every so often with this new system, and it happens. We won't count it against anyone if there are accidental multiple entries.

43. Spencer Rosengarten Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:06 am

    I have an IBM laptop that I had relied on for a lot of my work. I was SO confident of it that when my then girlfriend (now wife) needed to dump data off of her WIN98 PC, I volunteered to store her My Documents, Favorites, contacts, etc. on it until I could leisurely back the data up to CD-R or DVD-R.

    So of course my data decided to go POOF!…sort of. The motor on my hard drive died. And the cost to try and get the data off of it…I shudder every time I think about reaching out to Ontrack Data Recovery. I’m sure it’ll cost four figures…I just haven’t been able to muster the courage or the money to ask.

    Spencer

44. Judie Lipsett Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:19 am

    yeah! so are you really sure you want to enter?

45. Chris Magnusson Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:50 am

    I don't know yet if it involves data loss, but my computer (MY PRECIOUS!) decided to stop working last Friday. Everything *sounds* ok (hard drive, optical drive, fans; there is no clicking) but that's it. I get no leds other than the power led, and there is no video either on the built-in display, on vga-out, or on s-video.

46. David Gray Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 5:51 am

    This is easy and no more tragic than any other story. If you lose everything on your computer, you know it's gone and no telling of the story will help or replace anything. I had heard these stories, so I got an external hard drive. The day my OS died and took the external hard drive with it, made me realize One back up will never be enough. If you can't live with losing things, you better have six alternatives. So yes, please, give me one more backup for my backup so I won't have to get my back up ever again.

47. Joe Puig Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 9:02 am

    I always back up all my files and before USB drives I used from tape backup to floppy's. Since USB drives I find it easier and faster to update my data. 4 month ago I had put all my information on an USB drive (including all my downloaded program purchase licenses, ect). For no reason at all the computer refused to access the drive and after many hours with tech support, The format on the drive had changed possibly a virus and lost tears of data. some never to be replaced.
    Now I have 2 USB drives and the crucial data I also backup online service.
    Lesson learned you can never have to many backups.

48. Annu Rana Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 9:05 am

    My worst data loss was a 80 Gb Western Digital with my OS and archive partition on it. One day it just died. I tried everything including the freezer trick as a last resort. No luck. At least it taught me to do regular back ups of my important information. And I learned about a few data recovery solutions for a semi-working hard drive. Live and learn, and then keeping moving forward.

49. Ahmed Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 9:20 am

    Believe it or not, I've never had one ….. SO FAR

    It's just because I always tend to keep multiple backups of important data, in a word .. Cloud Computing .. Keep your backups online, available everywhere and to a great extent .. SAFE

50. breley Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:11 pm

    Way back in the days of DOS, our company used to back up all its data onto an external SCSI Tandberg tape drive. The 2GB tape itself (phat for the time) was the kind that had the metal plate on one side and the two large visible tape spools in the clear cartridge, kind of like an oversized cassette tape. But I digress…anyway, we'd do daily and weekly backups with alternating tape sets, and I'd alternate with another fellow. These data sets contained all programmatic, graphic and email backups for the company. Things were hunky-dory for a few months, until one day when the other caretaker capriciously decided to relabel the sets of tapes so the dates and signatures and IDs would be more easily read. They did indeed look much better, and since he had finished with his set of backups he handed me the tapes for my week. I set up the tapes and backups went fine for a better part of the week. Unfortunately, in those days we loved to use Micropolis SCSI drives, whose operation had all the musical sweetness of a low-speed dental drill, and the main server's drive failed. No problem, just fix the RAID, oh wait, no, that would have been too easy. No, we had a Gateway P100 box pressed into service as a server (such were the days in a small company), so when the drive failed it was time to haul out the tapes. A couple of graphic designers and programmers eagerly awaited our results, because an important project had been temporarily been stored on that server drive the week before. However, unbeknown to us, careless project manager deleted the folder because she needed space on the server for her project (in those days, 500MB of 320×240 video was a space hog).
    Restores were measured in geologic time back then, and after many hours of tediously restoring the server and the file data we discovered the needed directory was missing–the guy I worked with who labeled the tapes in fact mislabeled them, so that week set 1 was labeled week set 2 and vice versa. I had unknowingly been using the wrong tapes, so that the tape that should have had the designers' files from the previous week had been overwritten and now didn't, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of video shoot footage, premier files and custom programming had been irretrievably lost.

    BTW, that coworker and PM no longer work at the company…

51. lgreenberg Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 1:45 pm

    I have 2.

    1. The hard drive on my 3 month old iMac failed. Thank god for external hard drives and Time Machine.

    2. At one point I had been not backing things up but simply moving all my media files (pictures, movies, etc.) to an external drive. The drive failed and I lost everything.

52. Gary Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

    My biggest back-up misadventure occurred when I had the habit of saving too many files to my laptop hard drive, rather than to the server. In any event, lugging the laptop to and from work probably resulted in its early demise, but my hard drive started clicking. I knew that time was limited and I started downloading files to the network and trying to save desktop settings, browser bookmarks, etc. I actually saved about 90% of the data, but there is always something that is missed when you back-up piecemeal like I did. I'd love to have a USB drive large enough to mirror the hard drive.

53. Ben Woodward Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 2:50 pm

    We lost everyting on our computer, music, pictures, everything

54. Anthony Winner Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

    My latest story is our HR lady got a virus, and the day before I was leaving to go to a customers site I tried to help her get rid of it. Unfortunatly I was dumb and used a Thumb drive to run a AV program I had on it. Can you guess the result, yep I moved the virus from her computer to my laptop, I ended up with a brick the whole trip as I slowly lost the OS. If I had a portable backup I could have just restored an image of the OS from it, but insted had to wait till I got home 2 weeks later to do it from the restore DVD’s, fortunatly I didn’t lose any data, just a lot of time and frustration.

55. Selene M. Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm

    I don't have a data loss horror story. Hubby is very big on daily backups on external systems. Hope I still qualify for the giveaway..

56. Steve Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    I've had both weeks of work data lost because the company-wide backup didn't happen to include the computers in my department, and personal data lost including scanned pictures of family that I'd taken many hours to touch up and original art, music and writing.

57. Ran Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 5:41 pm

    Oh my. This couldn't have been posted at a better time. My HD just died on me a few days ago.
    All my documents, photos from trips to abroad, and backups of applications for my pocket pc were lost.
    If I do win this contest, I'm sure going to use it extensively!

    Thanks for the great contest!!

58. Tim Callow Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 6:43 pm

    Just happened last week. Got a last minute call to bail out an account team by facilitating a workshop in Chicago. we use various tools for workshops, Mindmaps, scoring templates, etc. and I religiously back up to thumb drives when I create, usually during the meetings, and definitely after the meetings. Two days worth of brainstorming is not the kind of data you should lose. Since this was a last minute thing I did not get a chance to do my usual prep work, and I forgot my backup drive, and my thumb drive. I have never had a problem with losing any files, because I am so careful about backing up and copying needed files to the thumbdrive. Because of my track record, and the harried nature of this particular session, I didn't even think about backing up to a thumbdrive during the meeting. At the very end, when we needed to show the results to the client, the scori9ng template had some problems and one of the techies in the crowd thought he could fix it. We took a short break in the meeting and tried to fix it, didn't really work but I managed to dance around it and client was happy. I never touched my tablet after the techie was finished doing whatever he was doing, and I had to run to the airport. The next day I start up my tablet, no file, its not there! Search again and again, older files but not a file with the last two hours worth of data. I am about getting sick when I finally found it, in a temp folder. Minutes of worrying because I didn't follow my regimen of backing up. Thanks for letting me vent.

59. Shan Gee Says:
    February 5th, 2009 at 8:15 pm

    This has to be the worst hard drive story here ever!

    I have an HP Slimline PC tower that I kept on the top of my desk. While I was working on my college assignments I decided to take a break because I was tired of typing. I had just gotten off my computer and my younger three-year old sister quickly ran underneath the desk. She started playing with the wires and I quickly went to stop her but it was too late because she had moved the wire and my HP Slimline PC fell down. I turned on my HP Slimline PC and heard some clicking noises and my PC just showed a blank screen. I searched up my problem online and found out that my hard drive had died. I looked up some hard drive recovery services online and saw that it would cost thousands of dollars to recover all my family pictures, school data, and many other documents from my hard drive. I couldn't afford to pay thousands of dollars just to recover a hard drive because I could of gotten a new computer for that amount so I just had to figure out another way to recover all the data. I saw an article where someone mentioned that they had managed to recover their data by "freezing their hard drive". I was a bit skeptical but I noticed a lot of people commenting that this worked with their hard drive. I put my hard drive in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and my family thought I was weird when I did that and they were all laughing. When I took the hard drive out after 10 hours I opened the case of my computer and plugged in the hard drive. I started my computer and it turned out that the hard drive didn't work! I couldn't afford to purchase a service to recover all my data so the only choice I had was to purchase a new hard drive to do my school work. I purchased a new hard drive from New Egg and my computer started working again. I save all my important word documents a hard drive now, and I've brought an extension wire so I don't have to put the slimline PC on my desk any more. If I won a Seagate portable hard drive it would make a lot of things easier for me and I could carry my work wherever I need and not worry about loosing it. Thanks for holding this contest GearDiary and I look forward to seeing if I win or not.

60. mkss55442 Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 1:49 am

    I'm a firm believer of backing up. I do a daily backup to an external drive and each month I copy the last month's backup to another hard drive. Now I need another hard drive to backup my backup laptop.

61. A K Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 4:17 am

    my worst data loss happened at work last Monday when my brand new laptop hard drive crashed. This happened two days before my project was going live. Luckily i had a backup which was 2 versions old and I was able fix things before project went live today. Its always good to have more than one backup.

62. vlbsweeps Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 3:33 am

    Well, back in the days…
    First computer had a 2GB hard drive and that was huge at the time, but I was running out of room (never thought about the back up concept). Well, I found this neat little option to compress a hard drive. Needless to say, eventually that compressed hard drive hiccuped and left me in a bind. Luckily, my son had a geek friend who was able to grab my data and put it on a couple of CDs. No more compressed drives thank you.

63. Michael Curtis Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    During my first programming class I was walking my final project over to be loaded when I tripped and my whole stack of cards went flying. Several ended up sliding underneath of a soda machine, utterly irretrievable.

64. Geoffrey Maugham Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

    My worst data loss was when I used Norton Ghost incorrectly and overwrote my entire data drive when I thought it was doing something else to it. Very embarrassing and very painful.

65. KC Kim Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    One time I got a virus on my computer and had no antivirus software and I had wished I had backup my data. I had to reinstall Windows and lose all my important documents, photos, and other important files.

66. Rodney Says:
    February 6th, 2009 at 7:20 pm

    I've had hd failures and OS corruptions before, so I decided to start storing all my family photos on a seperate internal HD. And I would periodically back them up to DVD. Over the course of about 3 years I had 40gb worth of photos. Unfortunately, I got busy and forgot to update by DVD backups. And then my picture backup HD failed. Arggh.

    Good thing was I only lost 3 weeks of photos. But they were the 3 weeks over Christmas. And it was my daughter's first Christmas. I usually can get data off HD's that have corrupted boot sectors and such, but this was physical failure… Double Arggh. I sent the HD to Segate it was going to cost $1400 and there was no guarantee on getting the data back.

    I got some similar photos from my parents and in-laws, so I'm only now missing about 1 week's worth of photos.

    Now I use Genie Backup Pro and SugarSync to store my photos on several HDs and in the 'cloud' I feel very protected now. Thank goodness. But I sure could use a way to easily backup my and my wife's laptop computer.

67. Lois Shores Says:
    February 7th, 2009 at 7:21 am

    I haven't had a problem yet

68. HeatherC Says:
    February 7th, 2009 at 4:44 pm

    This is for my honey, and her back-up problem. She recently was switching from Win 7 beta back to Vista. Well, she forgot to back-up her data before switching since she was in a rush to get things done. One of the probems is that she keeps her back-up drive at work since its too big to carry around. I think if it was at home where she would seen it, she would have remembered. So, portable drive would be perfect for her.

69. Alexander Horvath Says:
    February 7th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    I have always kept running backups of my stuff, but my fiancee is a different story… She’s not the most technologically adept person and never thought data was something she could loose….

    So one morning we’re still in bed and she’s reading an article (on Dicken’s criticism of Victorian pedagogy in his book “Hard Times” I think) while I slipped in and out of consciousness beside her. Seeing how comfortable I looked she decided to put the laptop away and curl up with me before getting up to officially start the day. She woke me up and passed me the laptop to put on the ground beside me so she could curl up… the problem was that I was not fully awake, and as I went to put the laptop down I let go and it flew across the room, bouncing on the floor twice before coming to a rest about 6 feet from the bed…

    Needless to say I was fully awake at that point. The laptop powered on and appeared to have survived the flight… but after I left for work it started making that horrible clicking sound and eventually gave up. A new hard drive later and her computer was good as new. Unfortunately there was nothing recoverable on her hard drive… she lost all of her music and a lot of her academic work from the last 3-4 years. Scrounging around on Gmail and her storage space at school we were able to find about 25% of her work but the rest has been lost forever. Being starving students I have been forced to share my external hard drive for mutual backups, but space is running out quickly…

    So yeah… that’s my data nightmare… ironic considering I’m known as the one who fixes things among all my friends and co-workers, yet in the case I was the bringer of death for my beloved’s data!

70. Peter H. Says:
    February 8th, 2009 at 1:25 am

    Ok so I consider myself to be fairly computer literate and over the years I have helped any number of friends and family with whatever computer woes were ailing them. One day my new girlfriend, Emily, mentioned to me that her parents had nearly run out of space on their computer. Her mother had recently gotten a digital camera (thanks to my suggestion) and had been filling up their computer by dumping thousands of pictures onto their computer – she takes great photos and has an award winning scrapbook collection.
    I told Emily that all they needed to do was purchase another hard drive and copy their data over to the new hard drive – and could I do it? Sure, anything to get in good with the parents! After they purchased the new hard drive I volunteered my services and set to work. I booted up to the data transfer software, specified my source drive, specified the destination drive, and let ‘er rip.
    Once the data transfer was finished, I rebooted and got the dreaded “Operating system not found” error. Turns out that I confused the source and destination drive – that’s right: I copied the BLANK drive over to the drive with their DATA which resulted in two blank drives!?! All of her Dad’s work files – gone. All of her mom’s photos – gone. Everything – gone. Oops.

71. Joe Says:
    February 8th, 2009 at 3:51 am

    I had a habit of storing my files on an external USB hard drive. One day, I was working on the train. With all the vibration of the ride, it damaged the HD and by the time I got to the hotel, the HD was unusable. I had to rewrite everything that I had done on the train ride (about 3 hrs of work) and I had a presentation the following day, so I had to stay up all night to catch up. Now, I carry 2 separate HDs and keep all my data backed up with double redundancy. Plus, I use Windows Live Sync (previously called FolderShare) to keep my files backed up remotely.

72. Geek Says:
    February 8th, 2009 at 9:50 pm

    I have always been wary of data loss and taken the proper precautions to ensure successful recovery from such disasters. This previously entailed a weekly process of cloning my hard drive to a secondary, external, hard drive as well as burning a copy of my personal files to CD. The idea of maintaining two copies, one complete clone and one individual backup, on different media was a logical choice for optimal protection. A few years ago, however, I learned the hard way that the improbable is always possible.

    < Too long — Continued below. >

73. Geek Says:
    February 8th, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    I was in the process of cloning my hard drive when a sudden, severe storm blew in. Confident that my UPS would protect my system from any possible surges, brownouts, etc, I let the cloning process continue. Moments later, however, lightning struck a high-voltage transformer a few feet outside the window, causing it to blow. The system instantly lost power, though the UPS continued to power the monitor and other peripherals plugged into it. Hoping the UPS had just failed to power the tower, it was not until the power was restored that I discovered the motherboard, both hard drives, and one of the optical drives were fried. Later testing seemed to indicate that the surge had not passed through or damaged the UPS…the tower was simply too close to the transformer when it blew.

    < Too long — Continued below. >

74. Geek Says:
    February 8th, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    At the time I only had one external hard drive, resulting in the loss of the lone clone. However, the CD backup maintained my hope of restoration. After rebuilding the computer I browsed the contents of the CD only to find my hopes shattered…nearly half of the files were reported as unreadable. Despite passing a verification scan after the disc's initial burning, my failsafe betrayed me as I learned the disc was faulty. It was then I learned lightening does strike the same place twice, figuratively speaking.

    I have been maintaining multiple copies of each backup/clone ever since, and as a result have had but a few lost files since. Nevertheless, one of those FreeAgent Go portables would be extremely useful as I have reached the capacity limits of my current drives and am once again approaching a state of vulnerability. Please Judie, help me avoid a return to such a precarious situation.

75. randy johnson Says:
    February 8th, 2009 at 10:59 pm

    lost a years worth of my wife's work documents one time. was not a happy time. would like to get this to prevent from happening again.

76. Michelle Says:
    February 9th, 2009 at 4:14 am

    Last June my faithful 4-year-old Systemax began to act quirky. I'd frequently have to reboot in the middle of surfing the net and it was running very sluggish. Errors abound. The grinding noises coming from the computer desk should have been a clue that something was wrong, but I figured the fan was just dirty. I pulled her out and vacuumed everything and figured we were golden.

    Until that fateful morning she refused to boot. I tried all my tricks and still it would hang and wouldn't start. The hard drive was shot. The loss? Every one of my iTunes gone besides the back-up that I had made over a year ago. All my pictures including the ones from my brother's wedding that I'll never be able to replace. My husband's geneaology data, there was a back-up on cd but it was old so all new data was gone. I had my address book loaded on my computer, no written backup..so everyone's address and phone numbers were gone. I not ashamed to say I cried..hard.

3 Trackbacks For This Post

1. Contest - Win a Seagate FreeAgent Go USB Drive — The Gadgeteer Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 11:20 am

   [...] How would you like to be one of six lucky people to win a 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go USB hard drive? Winners will even have their choice of color. We’re giving away three drives here on The Gadgeteer, and you can have another three chances to win over at Gear Diary! [...]

2. Judie Lipsett Says:
   February 8th, 2009 at 8:37 pm

   be sure to enter our seagate giveaway http://is.gd/iRJR ;you can also win by entering at the gadgeteer! http://is.gd/iRK9 enter now…hurry!

3. Judie Lipsett Says:
   February 9th, 2009 at 8:49 am

   winners chosen, posted and notified for the seagate hard drive giveaway. thanks for entering! http://is.gd/iRJR

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