It finally happened.  I experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure.  I’s been long overdue.  I’ve always been a slacker when it comes to backups, typically thinking to myself, “It’ll never happen to me, I really don’t need to back stuff up right now, I’ll get to it later.”  Then, inevitably, I never get to it.  Well let me tell you from my recently gained first hand experience:  back up everything even remotely important at least weekly, if not daily, for one day it will happen to you, and you’ll kick yourself for not having done enough backups.

I was busy working on the Technobabbles forum the other night when my hard drive started making this slight scraping sound.  I thought I should probably get a copy of the code I spent the past month working on over to my external hard drive, but I put it off since everything was still working.  This scraping noise came and went for several days with no intelligent action on my part until finally my laptop refused to start up.

It was at this point that I began to realize what I’d lost: a solid month of web development code and the past month of my financial data.  After frantically re-starting my laptop several times, then pulling the drive out and trying it in another computer, I started looking for some data recovery options.  I found several companies offering to perform data recovery for completely exorbitant sums of money (usually it’s not even listed, you have to submit your details and wait for an estimate).  What it typically involves for a hardware failure such as mine is the data recovery company performing a platter swap in a professional clean room (removing the sealed physical recording media from one drive and putting it into another functional drive).  Since I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy and unwilling to pay someone such ridiculous amounts of money for the service (we’re talking upwards of $1000 here), I looked into whether or not you could even do it outside of a clean room.

In the process I came across all sorts of arguments for both sides, and while it is definitely possible to do on your own outside of a clean room, neither drive will likely survive for an extended period after being opened up.  Fortunately for me I didn’t even have to go through that process, because I also ran across an old “try putting your hard drive in the freezer” trick.  At first I thought that idea would never work, but after seeing a few explanations for why it seems to work for some people I decided it was definitely worth a shot.

I put my drive into an external enclosure, then three hours and an ice-cold hard drive later I was off and running with a normal sounding (but very slow) hard drive.  Since I wasn’t expecting to have much time I was already prepped to move the data I needed over to an external drive, and sure enough it lasted long enough to get everything copied over.

Lesson learned:  always backup your data (and keep your fingers crossed that a freezer might be able to help).