The Basics of Data Backup and Recovery

I had a friend—let’s call him Dave, since that’s his name—who lost, in a fraction of a second, everything he’d done for the last twelve years.

Dave had been writing his memoirs and a book about Babe Ruth, and a series of laptops had held his manuscripts for both books. All his drafts, research, voice notes, and interviews had migrated from computer to computer over the years, and whenever his laptop would start acting funny, he’d get another one and sell the old one. Expensive, he figured, but worth it for a bit of security.

All in all, he’d changed laptops four times—most recently because he wanted to watch DVDs on his frequent plane trips to New York—but each time, he would just burn all his work to a couple of CDs and put them on the newer computer. He’d never thought that a laptop would fail without giving him enough warning to sufficiently back everything up.

Sound familiar? If this is how you treat your data—and for most people, it is—keep reading.

On a flight, Dave opened up the ol’ computer to watch a little Die Hard and ignore the large sweaty man loudly snoring next to him. When he flipped open his laptop, however, he didn’t see the warm, comforting masculinity of Bruce Willis. Instead, he heard a loud clicking sound and a blue screen displayed. From that point, the computer simply wouldn’t start. There’d been no warnings, no slowdown, absolutely nothing. The computer was pretty much brand new, only a few months old.

Back home, he tried all the standard tech stuff; he hooked the drive into another computer, put it in an external enclosure, tried an array of various programs, but regardless, it just wouldn’t load. He’d heard that putting a drive in a freezer would sometimes work, but when he tried it, uh, not so much (the drive did, however, smell faintly of ice cream and deer sausage after that point, a troubling fact given that neither food was in his freezer).

No matter what he did, the hard drive was gone.