|
Recently my wife and I
were in Duluth for a wedding and an overnight getaway. Between the
ceremony and the reception I received a call from Jon expressing a
little trouble with his laptop. He stated he was not able to access
some photos on his system and was concerned. I realized that he may
be dealing with a failing hard drive. Jon was quite worried due to
the fact that there were hundreds of family photos on the laptop and
no backups ever run. He knew that if he had lost this data he would
not only be answering to himself but also to his wife. I asked Jon
to contact our on-call engineer as I sent a text message requesting
the engineer to call Jon to insure they hooked up.
Sunday I followed up
with our on-call engineer to see what had come of the system
troubleshooting. He confirmed the drive was acting strange and had
recommended to shut down the system to prevent any further loss of
data and bring the laptop into our offices Monday morning.
Bright and early Monday
morning we received the laptop and found the drive to be failing
with many bad sectors. We quickly went to work to recover the
data. We used several utilities and techniques to recover the data
hoping to restore all the family photos for Jon’s sake. As luck
would have it, we restored 100% of the data. We replaced his failed
drive with a new one and rebuilt the laptop loading all the data
back on. Jon learned a valuable lesson regarding backups and
protecting his family photos.
Don’t wait until it is
too late to find out your data cannot be recovered even at a high
price. We have even seen some cases over the years where we were
not able recover data. Keep in mind, there are many ways to backup
your data including external hard drives, thumb drives, CD’s and
Online. They all have their pros and cons but all work better than
not doing anything at all. What ever method you choose, give “The
Best Christmas Gift” this year and make sure you don’t lose your
important documents or family photos. Backup that data often. It
is also a good idea to check your data occasionally to make sure you
can recover a document or two just to make sure your backup is
working. Just ask Jon.
Jeff Holds is an
IT consultant and partner at Phoenix Technology Solutions. Phoenix
Technology Solutions, LLC is a provider of computer hardware,
software, and I.T. services helping small & medium businesses in the
Twin Cities run secure & reliable networks. |
