With a significant part of Australia under water at the moment, over the next few weeks as the water eventually recedes and drains away, home owners and small businesses will be returning to their homes and offices to find what electrical equipment was left behind has been damaged by water.
Ideally they will have taken anything with a hard drive that contains precious information with them, but when you aren’t given much time to prepare (some towns would have been given more notice than others) it is highly likely that many people will be calling data recovery specialists over the coming weeks hoping that they can recover what is still stored on their hard disks.
What I thought we could therefore do for this weeks post is list a few sources of information that might provide useful tips if you are looking at how and what you can do to salvage your PC that has been damaged by water.
The reality is that insurance (if in place) will cover most of the hardware that has been damaged, so that may result in a new PCs and laptops provided to homes and businesses. However data is never covered by insurance regardless of how much you value it at. I am unsure if you can actually insure data (via an insurance policy). So people will be looking for assistance to be able to get their data recovered.
As a side note, when you eventually make your claim and receive your new equipment, this is the best time to get an offsite backup service in place so that if you end up in a similar situation over the next 12, 24 or 36 months (and we all know that Australia is well known to being prone to natural disasters), then your data will atleast be able to be salvaged so that you can get their businesses started again really quickly.
Appreciating that data is not going to be the first priority for these poor people, if they are small business owners then they will need to start looking at rebuilding their businesses and so finding previous records of transactions, contacts, accounts and books will be important to them.
Tips For Handling Storm-Damaged Hard Drives File corruption and data loss often occur as a result of a flood, fire or other natural disaster. Yet even if business plans, financial spreadsheets or important emails are “lost” or appear to be “gone,” they are most likely recoverable if the appropriate steps are taken from the outset. Ontrack Data Recovery™ (www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au) operates data recovery labs equipped with cleanrooms to recapture data that has been corrupted or seemingly destroyed.
Rain and seawater harm the data stored on hard disk drives, tapes and other storage devices in two primary ways. First, they cause electrical damage, which makes data inaccessible to the user. Secondly, when computer media is submerged in water, water may leak through the protective seal of the hard drive, spreading dirt and other contaminants onto the storage area.
Visit this link to access the rest of the article and tips…
The second article is focused on dropping a cup of water, coffee or other liquid on your laptop. It provides a step by step guide on what to do and what not to do:
If you’re tempted to down a soda, water, glass of wine, coffee, or other liquid while typing away at your keyboard, you may end up paying the ultimate price—liquid spilled into your computer from an accidental knock, a few drips or a dropped cup. If this happens, don’t panic. Instead, follow these simple instructions as quickly as you can to try to salvage your computer.
The third article is US based but still very relevant.
Here are some tips on how to preserve water damaged hard drives so that as a business or individual you can retrieve your data and shorten the time it takes to get your business or life back on track.
And finally below I have two videos which will tell you what not to do if you get water spilled onto your laptop or hard drive. Some really good tips. Most importantly the best thing to do however is contact your local PC technician who can assist you to make the best decision.
Both videos have been sourced via the US. If I find some local ones I will replace them but atleast this gets us started.
That was the story surrounding my laptop a week ago. Vista failed and so I decided to wipe the machine and start again. Along with Vista went my data. So I spent Saturday morning loading Carbonite back on. I hadn’t done this for my own personal data in a very long time. In actual fact, I hadn’t had a PC crash since I purchased Carbonite, which is over a year ago now.
My backup consists of a second internal hard drive (which keeps a copy of all my files). Its not synced regularly enough though and this is something that I have to fix this time round. I also have 2 external drives that are pretty much copies of each other.
My only up to date form of backup is Carbonite, and the fact that it was up to date was a real blessing because the last time I had updated the files on the external hard drive was in August. You see I know better but its still a very painful exercise to manually do backups.
I reinstalled Carbonite pretty smoothly and noticed that after the install the restore options included Remote Access and a full restore. Remote access is now your “quick I need 10 files brought down” solution. I did as it advised and used it to bring back some key invoicing files that I was needing to work with. Presto within seconds the spreadsheets where back onto my PC and I was on my way.
This is where you say $72 well spent.
Now it was time for the full restore. I only use Carbonite for work related files not so much for photos, although I do have some photos. What I am getting to is that my backup with Carbonite is under 10GB. The challenge I have however is that my Optus internet only gives me 12GB per month. Not enough, but until I change it its what it is. So the dilemma I had was how to bring the data down and not exceed my limit. Optus charges an arm and a leg for excess data (all in the T/Cs of course).
In a normal month it wouldn’t be an issue but given I had been downloading files to bring the laptop back from the dead, I had spend a considerable about of my bandwidth and the month had only just begun.
So what I decided to do was to move my Carbonite installation out of Restore mode, ie into Backup mode and then manually bring the files down set by set until I had it all down. I used the Carbonite Backup Drive for this. This basically means that the most important files come first and then the rest gradually. I was and am keeping a close eye on my bandwidth spent.
So the restore options now available with the latest version of Carbonite, are to either do a full restore, search for individual files (by name) and restore them one by one or to use Remote access to manually sort through your files and restore the ones you want. An improvement they can make is to allow you restore folders as well as individual files.
If you want to manually move through your files and folders ie via your Backup Drive, you need to get yourself out of Restore mode. This has a catch however. If the files aren’t restored to the exact same location as they are held on the Carbonite servers, Carbonite will begin deleting the Backup thinking that you have removed it intentionally. You have 30 days to get your files back before you lose them from Carbonite as well.
Next week we are going to go through what I experienced moving from Vista to Windows 7.
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.
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.
In a PC Authority tech review I read today, they covered a new hard drive that was recently released. Now this happens every day I am sure, but this one was of particular interest. It was for the ioSafe waterproof, shockproof and fireproof hard drive. Now I will not be going into any detail here about the product (you can read it here), but it comes with a nice price tag of $499 for a 1.5TB drive.
I can’t recall if this is good value or not, I am sure that there is a premium in there for the waterproof, shockproof and fireproof component.
Research shows that data loss most likely to happen because your PC dies on you, not because of a natural disaster. This does happen and with summer coming along in Australia, the probability is fast increasing. The next reason is probably some virus infecting your machine and crippling it. This then results in you having to wipe it and start again. Next is probably human error.
Regardless of the reason though, having a hard drive means you have to use it. Storing it in the desk draw doesn’t help. The only way to really ensure that your data is backed up is to either setup an automated process using an external hard drive that is constantly connected, or to go online. The additional benefit of going online is that you also get the waterproof, shockproof and fireproof as an added bonus.
If you are a small business operator or have lots of precious family photos that you couldn’t bare loosing, then as well as the ioSafe hard drive, why not consider online backup like Carbonite.
A new report completed by Australian computer technology support company Geeks2U, has revealed the most common reasons computer users call support lines, with infections such as viruses and malware topping the list.
The Geeks2U Australian Computer Barometer gathers data from its internal system records to identify the main reasons why people call computer support lines across the country.
Computers infected with viruses and other malware accounted for over a quarter of Geeks2U activity in June (27 percent), followed by desperate pleas to help retrieve lost data (14 percent) and followed closely by operating systems.
Despite the large number of virus and malware issues, only three percent involved Macs. When it came to operating system problems, 10 percent were Vista related, 15 percent were XP related and only 3.4 percent were Mac related.
