Your end of year backup

This week’s post aims to give you a few real life experiences on what it costs to get your backup back when your hard drive fails.

Our first story comes from Temora Computers who know a thing or two about helping people out with their computers. They quoted an interesting report produced by Google and Carnegie Mellon which found typical failure rates of 2 to 4 percent and a high of 13 percent, in contrast to the less than 1 percent you’d expect based on vendor. You can read the whole report here.

For most of us, these reports simply reemphasize the need for smart practices. Keep your drives cool and, most important, backed up so that if failure occurs, it’s merely an inconvenience and not a financial or emotional disaster.

In their experience it can cost well over $1000 to get your data back and they believe that the more desperate you are for the data, the more it potentially cost you.

One particular customer I remember speaking to had recently purchased a new PC. It was actually designed specifically for her. She had had the PC for just over 12 months when it had died on her. It cost her $1200 to get her data back and 2 weeks of waiting. I think there is another post on this website about it.

My personal experience has been a lot more tame and less expensive. I had had my current laptop for about 4 months when Vista came out with its first major update. Must admit I was on dialup then and it took me a while to get the download. I had waited up all night or this. The download started running but I was so tired that I turned the laptop off to get some sleep.  Next day when I went to start it, it wouldn’t start.  Cost me $50 to get my data back and about 48hrs of waiting. I got it all back other than my email.

I had taken it back to where I bought the laptop and I think they just felt sorry for me.

Here is another story I found on Flying Solo

I lost everything with the failure of an external hard drive that was 3mths old. Paid $2500, experience was ok but sickening wait for six weeks to see if it was retrievable. I’m now protected by Carbonite

Six weeks is steep and it could knock your business right out. And paying what is probably the 2 X cost of the PC can hurt a lot, let alone the impact it can have on a businesses cashflow. This particular customers moved on to Carbonite, and is now happy and backed up.

Another Flying Solo user wrote:

I heard the DJ’s talking about this on the radio the other day. One of the jocks was quoted $1250+ Gst to retrieve his data.

My external crapped out once also, but luckily my flatmate worked at a computer shop and fixed it at home for nothing. Only took a couple of hours from memory.

This guy was lucky enough to have assistance from a friend. I wonder if he got it all back if what he did after wards in terms of getting some ongoing protection.

For business users who have servers, the following message from Google’s finding is worth reading:

Google’s findings do support one tip: If you encounter a scan error during a routine error check (by running Scandisk, for example), your drive is 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives that don’t show such errors. IT pros recommend replacing a drive with scan errors.

In summary, no matter how much you spend on your hardware, there are never any guarantees. Even though you have warranty on the hardware, the data is not covered and it is most likely that if the hard drive is salvageable, the repair centre will simply wipe it and start again, deleting everything from it. Alternatively, they will call you and advise that if you want the data it will be an extra $xxxx.

Personally I would prefer to be in some control of how I can get my data back.