hey guys,

i need some help from you all. I had to face the ultimate tradegy 3 days back when my entire hdd crashed. it is not being detected not even in the bios. i had made some backup on dvds but still there was a lot of data in it. I will be giving it for recovery tomorrow where they will replace the faulty IC on the hdd and extract all the data.

Any ideas what else i should do to save my data??

Howdy,

Software that automatically backs up your data on a regular basis ?

Woodmann

I think anyone has gone through such ordeal.
After the fact, recrimination, shoulda coulda woulda ougtha, does not help.
1. data recovery: From simple and cheap to complex and expensive: Start by connecting your HD to another computer as a non boot/system drive and see if it is accessible. Yes? good, get data out. No, fuck. . . next move.

If the failure is hardware, motor, crash, you likely have to pay stiff amounts of money, 800 to 8000 dollars to get your data back.
Worth it??

Next time, think about keeping one, already cheap HD in your rig as the deposit for your precious data and make auto backups.

Every hard drive has an estimated time to failure measured in hours of use. S.M.A.R.T. data can tell you such info.

thanks guys

after trying everything i have given it for professional recovery.

I was about to buy a new one when this happened. i did check the stats a few days before the hdd crashed and it showed

Number of times powered ON : 5526
Number of hours (total runtime) : about 14,250 hours

@Woodmann - you are right. i leaned it the hard way.

backing up on a portable hdd or online storage seems to be the best way

GEEK

i am really a geek, to be here posting in these days... d'uh.

Dont bother with backup: you will do your backup diligently for say 3-6 months, than you will restart slowly delaying backup, and you will eventually fall down to the same ugly point.

I talk for personal experience. Unfortunately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_1#RAID_1

is your solution. Almost ALL motherboard support it. It is cheap, and it guarantees you a very low failure rate.
To save yourself against bad manufacturing, I suggest you to buy the same model into different brand stores. Hopefully, they will have had different stocks.

Dont bother with (regular) backups. You wont do it, over the time.

Oh i forgot: check out the MTBF of HD's, and choose the ones with the higher one. Dont bother with hd cooling covers, unless you take seagate stuff -those guys cheated and removed the anti-noise support to keep old mechanics even with other manufactures.
Clearly, I would not use r1 for the 700gb HD filled with your -legally purchased- music and films, but only for the one you keep Documents/Source.

RAID is good, but it doesn't protect you from accidental deletion or from a disaster that damages the entire system (fire, lightning strike, etc.). Having off-site backups is really the only way to go if you want actual data security.

Edit:
To contribute -

You might want to try ddrescue:

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

This saved my HDD once when nothing else would read it.

i have given it for recovery and they haven't responded yet

@Maximus : Thats really Geeky i never thought of it before

as far as ddrescue goes, my hdd is not just not detected how can i use software when the software wont be able to detect the device. The media recovery guys will replace the faulty chip on the board and extract the data.

Edit: Nevermind, I didn't realize you were dealing with a faulty IC. Yeah, if the IDE/ATA/SCSI interface on the drive is shot, you aren't going to be able to use something like ddrescue. I have been able to use it successfully when I had other physical problems with the drive, though, including a situation where neither Windows nor Linux would mount the partition at all.