One of my favorite songwriters is the late Rich Mullins. I’m going to quote him here, but understand the song “Brother’s Keeper” is not about data recovery:
Now the plumber’s got a drip in his spigot
The mechanic’s got a clank in his car
And the preacher’s thinking thoughts that are wicked
And the lover’s got a lonely heart
The truth is that not all of us are as perfect as we should be. On Wednesday, I got caught with a failed hard drive. This wouldn’t be a big problem except that I didn’t have a good backup. That’s right. This mechanic had a clank in his car. Of all the people in the world who should have seventeen backups of critical data because he understands how fragile digital storage can be, I’m first.
So there I was with a hard drive that was beyond failed and 10 months of family photos inaccessible. I wanted to throw up. Literally.
I grabbed the department’s spare laptop so I could try to recover some data, but my attempts all failed. We’ve got a USB adapter for SATA drives, and with it plugged in, the laptop was slow to respond and gave me all sorts of weird error messages. Windows could see a drive was there, but it wouldn’t let me access it.
I found VirtualLab Data Recovery at download.com and thought I’d try it out. It was free to scan the hard drive, and then you have to pay for a license key to recover files. That seemed fair enough. The bottom line is that eventually it worked, and I got most of my files back.
The software wasn’t great though. It was great in that it got what I needed from a failed drive, but the interface, behavior, and overall design of the software was not good. So here’s the tip of the day: if you need data recovered, VirtualLab Data Recovery will probably do it, but you’ll still probably need an IT guy to do it for you.
Also, I’ve got a backup now. (It’s on a USB drive for now, but it’ll end up on Amazon’s cloud before the weekend is through.) And I no longer want to throw up. I’ll spend the weekend reinstalling everything and getting the laptop all setup how I like it, but I suppose that’s the price I pay for not having good backups (in addition to the price I paid for the data recovery software).
