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.
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.
I thought some of our small business customers would appreciate a story like this.
I just wanted to share this story to hopefully help others avoid a tragic mistake that so many experience everyday. I am an independent business, doing video post-production work for clients on all sorts of projects, large and small. I had historically backed up my data locally, replicating my hard drives on 2 or 3 external backup drives. About 4 months ago, however, during lunch with one of my clients, he mentioned that he had signed up with a new backup service called Carbonite. He liked the convenience of the service since he could simply let his backups run to a remote site and not have to worry about maintaining anything.
I was skeptical at first, since I didn’t like the idea of sending my critical information anywhere offsite. But my client raised a good point – a lot of Fortune 1000 companies are doing just this – using services such as Salesforce.com – outsourcing IT infrastructure is just the new way of doing things. If you want to compete, I remember him saying, you’ll need to focus on your core business and not have to worry about hot-swapping drives and power redundancy, etc.
Well, I decided to sign up for a trial of Carbonite, and after discovering that the service only costs around 5 bucks a month, wondered why I had spent all that time and money worrying about hard drives. Still, I thought the service had to be complex and would go down on me at some point, as do most online services (right when you need them). To my surprise, however, Carbonite was very easy to setup – it’s a lightweight application that installs on your computer in seconds, and then after a brief setup process where you tell the app which folders and files you want to backup, it does the rest for you. Much easier than configuring windows and various utility apps to replicate folders locally!
Anyways – the critical part of the story came months after setting Carbonite up. I live in the Los Angeles area, which is not exactly known for it’s tropical thunderstorms, but we had a bad storm one winter. I remember watching the TV and then suddenly everything went dead. Not a common occurrence, but I figured that it was just a routine power outage.
I few minutes later the power came back on and after checking on a few things in my apartment I wandered into my home office to do some work. I tried to boot up my computer, and nothing, It was dead. I tried everything and realized that both my computers were fried. So much for my power surge protectors, I later found out that mine was only rated up to 30 volts! So I lost 2 computers and all the data on those.
The crazy part was that I was just finishing up a huge animation project that was a 4 month contract with a major studio. I had gigabytes of files across all my drives that were lost. I took out my laptop and logged into Carbonite, crossing my fingers that the data was still there! To my relief, once I logged in, I found that all my data was there and ready to be downloaded.
Had I somehow lost all that data, I would have defaulted on a $50K+ contract, not to mention the ramifications on my business overall from losing out on a successful outcome with a marquee client. I can tell you that the experience was heart-wrenching, but the relief I felt from seeing all my data there safe in a remote data center somewhere just convinced me that backing up your data is just a good insurance policy that’s worth much more than the $7 a month it costs!
Hopefully my story will help others avoid a terrible outcome when disaster strikes – you just never know when something crazy and unexpected can happen!
When I first starting working at Carbonite Australia, I read through many of the articles written by Carbonite Inc in the US about clients losing their data, I also read as much research as I could about the statistical probability of your hard drive failing. Almost 12 months on and with our client base growing here in Australia, it amazes just how many calls we get from customers who have just had a PC failure and want to know how they use their Carbonite subscription to recover their lost files.
We get several calls a day and they make for great stories when you are on the phone with a customers wanting to know more about Carbonite and how it works.
Today’s post has more to do with an article in The Age yesterday on Data Recovery. It was written by Dave Thompson (Digital Life section). The point of the article was that hard drives fail all of the time, even new ones, in new PCs. When this does happen, most people rush to their nearest PC store (or where they purchased the hardware from) to get advice on how they can recover their data. As Data Recovery is a specialist field, most PC stores will tell you that the data is no longer recoverable and you should forget about it and start again.
The price for data recovery of a failed hard drive can run into the thousands, all depending on who you go to and how desperate you are to get the data back.
Dave goes on to explain (in much detail) about the physical make-up of the hard drive as well as how it works and what happens when it gets damaged. He also leaves us with the message that if we really want to recover our data, it is worth while that we seek specialists in the field of Data Recovery rather than a general PC store. And it is certainly not something you would want to try on yourself.
The issue is that many computer “repair” people aren’t up with data recovery and file this sort of thing in the “too hard” basket.
They either arbitrarily replace the drive or wipe the contents and start again, claiming recovery is impossible.
My advice, if you are very attached to the “lost” data, is do nothing with the drive and seek a second opinion, preferably from someone who advertises “data recovery” services.
Ask about methods used and go for those who sound like they know what they are doing.
Avoid running the drive as this can make things worse, and resist the temptation to “have a go” yourself; data recovery is a specialist field and the best option is to let them work their mojo. You’ll find many operate a no data/no charge policy and really, by that stage what have you got to lose?
Online backup services such as Carbonite are getting more and more attention from PC media each day. This is because they have become a real option for the consumer and small business. Two or three years ago, offsite back up was only for the mid to large sized businesses, today we can all access the same service and pay less than $6 per month for it. How is that for technology making our life easier.
Data recovery with a service like Carbonite is relatively simple. Once you have your PC back up and running, you simply log into your Carbonite account, reinstall Carbonite and then begin the restore process by selecting which files you want to download. If you want access to your files before your PC is ready, then use the Remote File Access service to download the files off the internet.
I have had a my hard drive crash a few times and had most of the data recovered. It cost about $50, but I did lose quite a bit of data. Thankfully I now use Carbonite so I have my important files backed up offsite automatically for me.
