28 Messages In 12 Hours

That's how many emails I've received with the following common subject:

[superstars]RE: You've pressed your record - now what? MIA MIND MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT PROMOTION

The most messed up thing is that all but two of them are messages with ever-increasing amounts of vitriol asking to please be removed from the sender's email list. Me, I just marked the first 23 as spam, and the rest are being taken care of.

However, perhaps someone who works for this "entertainment company" might want to be made aware that they seem to be spamming at least two different time zones with what amounts to the potential to be the biggest unintentional "reply all" chain I've ever seen.

For Those Who Recovered My Data, I Salute You!

So, my last post was a very long lament about my beloved music, photos, and such being held hostage by a bitter old hard drive that knew I was getting ready to put it out to pasture.

Late last week (after some gnashing of teeth, but a surprisingly miniscule amount of wailing) I got in touch with a couple of companies to see just how many limbs I was going to have to hand over to get my data unearthed and accessible again. After an earlier conversation, I was afraid it would be at least one each of an arm, a leg, and perhaps an unmentionable. I wasn't exactly looking forward to these phone call to DriveSavers and Ontrack Data Recovery to get prices.

DriveSavers, as you may know, is the grand-daddy of the data recovery industry. They also charge commensurate with their reputation and experience. I'd used them before, but I had a company budget behind me to foot the bill. While I hadn't heard of Ontrack, they had come highly recommended, and I really had to scour the internet to find even a mildly discouraging word about them (and even that was essentially about speed on an incredibly complex job, rather than effectiveness). The fact that their price was half as much as what DriveSavers was quoting sure didn't hurt.

Besides, if they were good enough to recover data from the Shuttle Columbia as well as this campfire mishap, then surely they could take care of my problem with, er, well, no problem, right?

I got back in touch with Traci, the rep I'd gotten my price quote from. She, by the way, was as helpful and courteous as could be throughout the entire procedure. I arranged to have my drive sent to Ontrack on Monday afternoon (thanks again to the crew at the MacMedics DC area office, specifically Mike and Charles). Once it arrived on Tuesday, I got an email containing a link to their online tracking system that allowed me to keep an eye on the progress of my drive as it went through their recovery process, which was a nice touch. After just one day, they were working on it in the clean room.

First thing Thursday morning, I received an email informing me that the drive was ready for recovery, along with a complete list of the files from the drive indicating that all but two (out of about 30,000, give or take 1,000) were 100% recoverable. Needless to say, I was a happy camper. Finding out that the final pricing came in at even less than I had prepared myself for had me just this short of giddy.

The fact that I wound up having this little parcel of happiness show up this morning was really more than I could have hoped for. Sure, maybe I didn't have the most miraculous data recovery situation ever known, but everything had been recovered and sent back to me in a matter of five business days at a relatively affordable price.

And now, my new buddy, as seen at the top of the post, is busy transferring all of the recovered data to the drive I was planning on backing ol' trusty up to two weeks ago when this all started. At least one thing will be right with the world again soon.

Hopefully, I will never have to make a data recovery company choice ever again, but if I do, I'll be sure to give Ontrack a call.

Oh Hard Drive, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Any coincidence it looks a bit like HAL 9000?

Just over a week ago, I decided that my beloved LaCie 400GB Big Disk Extreme external hard drive was ready to be retired. I had come into possession of a gleaming new 1TB LaCie d2 Quadra, and had everything in place to copy the goodies held on "Ol' Trusty" to their new home. I shut down Thursday night, and went to bed with dreams of roomy new storage filling my head.

Apparently, somewhere in the night, the drive must have figured out that it was getting ready to be put out to pasture, and beat me to the punch by quitting before I could fire it.

When I came home from work on Friday evening, and booted up my computer, "Ol' Trusty" turned into "Ol' Busty" and decided it no longer wanted to spin up and talk to my computer anymore. There were no tell-tale grinding sounds, and all the symptoms were similar to a simple power supply failure that I had remedied in the past. Calmly (well, relatively calmly) I ordered a new power supply and hoped against hope that it would be the solution again this time.

Unfortunately, hope failed.

So I took the sucker in to the fine people at MacMedics to see if they could either bring it back to life, or mind meld it onto a younger, healthier drive for me. Unfortunately, I just got the call that it's beyond their capabilities, and I now have to call in the heavy artillery if I want to get back on track. I shudder to think about the monetary output I'm going to have to incur for this, but what can I do? Sure, I could reconstruct my music library, but I don't think I'll be able to pull a "Be Kind, Rewind" style recreation of all the photos that are on that puppy. Guess it's time to get comfy over that barrel.

I wish I had anyone else to blame but me.

As I had already known, and have now had painfully reinforced, I was a damned fool for not having a backup of such a significant amount of valuable data in place to deal with this issue. I'm often somewhat stubborn, but when I've been taught a harsh lesson, I generally tend to be a quick learner, and do what I can to make sure I don't make the same HUGE mistake twice.

Hello Drobo.

Photo credits: Lazurite / Flickr, Emil Erlandsson / Flickr