I just lost 3 years of data on my computer

[KayMote]

Rough day.
Yesterday my computer was incredibly slow and after a hard reset it refused to boot up at all, so I took it to an IT repair shop to have it checked.
Just now I got the call from the shop that my computer will live (yay), but he had to exchange the hard drive and unfortunately could not save any data from me whatsoever.

I'm incredibly sad mostly because of all the photos that are now lost forever. Photos from past holiday trips and especially from a time of a relationship that I ended around 2 months ago - it all vanished just like that. I have the tendency to keep things from past relationships for sentimental reasons, store everything in an so called 'Ex-box' and look at it every few years, since as a sentimental person I like the idea of reflecting over a time where you had all those intense feelings towards another person. It's all gone now forever and all I have left are the memories. It kind of makes me sad.

And no... I didn't create any back ups on an external hard drive, because I'm stupid. So I guess the lesson is: always safe your dearest data people!

 

[Deleted member 12129]

Make sure the shop gives you the original hard drive, and look into data recovery software. You might be able to salvage something yourself

 

[dallow_bg]

Well, now you know.

 

[imbarkus]

If the pics are that valuable to you there are data recovery services. Get the old drive back from the shop.

Might even be able to hook it up yourself as a second drive and get the data with some tools yourself.

EDIT: Years ago an employer I worked for elected to pay thousands of dollars to a recovery service for some crucial data on a bad drive. Not always possible, but often just a matter of how much it's worth to you.

 

[Jmdajr]

I have on site and off site backups of all my pictures. Don't suffer like our poor friend.

 

[Cels]

And no... I didn't create any back ups on an external hard drive, because I'm stupid. So I guess the lesson is: always safe your dearest data people!

Click to shrink...

ok no HDD but what about the cloud? like google photos?

 

[Commedieu]

Get your hdd back. You can repair and recover potentially. Not everything but some stuff. Depending on how bad it failed.

Mechanical hard drive or solid state?

 

[SealedSeven]

Sorry about your porn collection

 

[Deleted member 39374]

Everybody has a point where they lose their data and then from that point on you learn to have proper backup habits. It's tough love but it works.

"If it's not backed up, it doesn't exist" -IT adage

 

[Mupod]

Did he just...keep the drive or something? Don't just take his word for it - get that drive back, install it in another PC and at least try to read the data. There's data recovery options ranging from ultra expensive to 'put the hard drive in the freezer for a few minutes, put it back in the PC and pray'

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

This is basically a digital car crash without insurance. Everyone has a "total loss" moment that teaches them to backup all their shit on the cloud. Everything. And a secondary physical drive if you have to. It's a hard lesson for the OP but a preventable one for everyone reading:

BACK.

UP.

YOUR.

SHIT.

Not in case IF your harddrive fails or becomes corrupted, but WHEN, because it will happen.

 

[mhayes86]

Sorry to hear that, OP. I have a lot of stuff backed up from important docs, pictures, and music on multiple drives that I replace every few years. There's also cloud storage services to consider.

As another mentioned, get the original drive back. You can mount it as another drive and either fiddling around with permissions or using a data recovery software, you can at least attempt a last effort recovery.

 

[KayMote]

It was an built in hard drive in a notebook. The guy told me it was to 51% damaged - whatever that means. I will try to get the hard drive back, but unfortunately I have no background in IT stuff whatsoever, so it will be difficult to recover anything myself.

 

[Kittens McMittens]

100GB of Google Drive is like £16/yr and it's super easy to get it to backup your desktop/pictures/documents. There's no reason to not be backing up these days.

Edit: also, when it comes to photos, Google will let you backup lots of stuff for free (thought not at original quality, unless they come from like a Pixel phone or something).

 

[Commedieu]

It was an built in hard drive in a notebook. The guy told me it was to 51% damaged - whatever that means. I will try to get the hard drive back, but unfortunately I have no background in IT stuff whatsoever, so it will be difficult to recover anything myself.

Click to shrink...

Don't worry you've got theinternet. Hope isn't lost. Might be pricey but you have various options to work through before giving up.

Or just save it for when you have the money..

But you have a myriad of options. Before u have to spend any serious money

 

[RadzPrower]

I backup my stuff a lot. Pictures go to the cloud in addition to hard copies, I have an entire drive that is effectively duplicated across two drives, and I have additional cloud storage I use to backup specific things I deem critical.

 

[Deleted member 18944]

It was an built in hard drive in a notebook. The guy told me it was to 51% damaged - whatever that means. I will try to get the hard drive back, but unfortunately I have no background in IT stuff whatsoever, so it will be difficult to recover anything myself.

Click to shrink...

Hi OP, I work in IT and this is my two cents

Fuck that shit.

Get your hard drive back and search for special labs / companies that do data recovery. I have a hard time believing a PC repair shop would have the expertise to determine if your hard drive cannot be recovered in any way.

Also - Use Google Photos for free backups of pictures (not at original quality).

 

[Mortemis]

3 years without a single backup. Brutal.

Personal external drive + cloud backups for things like photos ftw.

 

[Jroc]

Is it better to use a HDD or an SSD for on-site secondary backups?

 

[cecilpaladin32]

That sucks OP. I had my phone stolen years ago. I managed to get it back but had to wipe all the data - I lost a picture I had with George R.R. Martin from a book signing. I've taken very few meaningful pictures in my life, but whenever I take one now, I e-mail it to myself instantly. I also will probably start using OneDrive, because it's on my new laptop.

 

[chaostrophy]

Not in case IF your harddrive fails or becomes corrupted, but WHEN, because it will happen.

Click to shrink...

Yeah. I work at a data center, and hard drives die constantly. We're always replacing them. It's so common that on servers, standard practice is for every drive to be mirrored in a RAID as well as being backed up to avoid the trouble of a backup restore every time a drive fails. PCs don't need that level of redundancy but my workplace has really driven the point home that anything on a single drive should never be considered permanent or safe.

 

[Polk]

With todays prices of flash memory I stopped reusing cards with photos few years ago. And cloud storage like OneDrive/Google Drive are cheap enough people should think about using them.
Also get your drive back. With programs like Recuva you should be able to recover something unless your drive is totally borked.

 

[Alavard]

I recommend buying Spinrite and giving it a try. If the drive still mechanically works and can be read at all, there's a chance Spinrite can get at least some of the data back. If anything will work, it's Spinrite.

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

However, double-check that the data recovery place you went to didn't attempt Spinrite already, as many do.

 

[MrKlaw]

Is it better to use a HDD or an SSD for on-site secondary backups?

Click to shrink...

I'd use a Nas if possible so you can automate It. It's the forgetting/can't be arsed to plug things in thatused to stop me. Cloud+ Nas is a godsend because it takes my laziness out of the equation.


OP get your drive back. Should be able to get a cheap enclosure to turn it into a USB HDD then try some data recovery options - repair guy possibly didn't even try anything except file manager

and regardless of whether you get anything back - at minimum sign up to free Dropbox or google one for a couple of dollars a month

 

[KayMote]

Hi OP, I work in IT and this is my two cents

Fuck that shit.

Get your hard drive back and search for special labs / companies that do data recovery. I have a hard time believing a PC repair shop would have the expertise to determine if your hard drive cannot be recovered in any way.

Also - Use Google Photos for free backups of pictures (not at original quality).

Click to shrink...

Thanks a lot! That's restoring some hope at least :)

 

[Gemüsepizza]

Is it better to use a HDD or an SSD for on-site secondary backups?

Click to shrink...

HDD. Afaik data on SSDs can corrupt/be lost after some time if not powered on.

Edit: It seems modern SSDs are getting better at this, but I still would go for HDDs, as you could get, for example, 2 cheap HDDs for the same price.

 

[firehawk12]

I'd use a Nas if possible so you can automate It. It's the forgetting/can't be arsed to plug things in thatused to stop me. Cloud+ Nas is a godsend because it takes my laziness out of the equation.

Click to shrink...

Is it better to use a HDD or an SSD for on-site secondary backups?

Click to shrink...

Yeah, you want NAS in some RAID config. The type of disks just determines how fast things will be indexed in the setup.

Thanks a lot! That's restoring some hope at least :)

Click to shrink...

Some places will give student discounts if you're invested in trying to get the data back. It can be pricey though.

 

[squeakywheel]

Love how they just claimed 51 percent damaged. Ask one of your IT friends to try recovering it for you if you have no funds or experience.

 

[StrangerDanger]

Is it better to use a HDD or an SSD for on-site secondary backups?

Click to shrink...

Besides NAS...
HDD, especially if you are not giving the drives continuous or consistent power.
Plus you can get 2TB drives for dirt cheap via HDD that will last so long

 

[out_of_touch]

Lol ex-box

 

[VorpalNonsense]

You mention that before that one last reset, it had successfully booted and your files were still around. If the drive is only one power cycle away from what was a successful boot then most of the data is probably recoverable.
It may be half dead and no longer usable as a boot disk but there's still a good chance to get data off of it as long as it still spins. You might even be able to just stick it in an external bay and copy things manually. Sometimes to get files off drives like that I just make a 1:1 clone onto a good drive using something like inateck's dual dock that has built in copy. Then whatevers left is on a good drive that copies fast.

Get that drive back if the files are important to you.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

Rough day.
Yesterday my computer was incredibly slow and after a hard reset it refused to boot up at all, so I took it to an IT repair shop to have it checked.
Just now I got the call from the shop that my computer will live (yay), but he had to exchange the hard drive and unfortunately could not save any data from me whatsoever.

I'm incredibly sad mostly because of all the photos that are now lost forever. Photos from past holiday trips and especially from a time of a relationship that I ended around 2 months ago - it all vanished just like that. I have the tendency to keep things from past relationships for sentimental reasons, store everything in an so called 'Ex-box' and look at it every few years, since as a sentimental person I like the idea of reflecting over a time where you had all those intense feelings towards another person. It's all gone now forever and all I have left are the memories. It kind of makes me sad.

And no... I didn't create any back ups on an external hard drive, because I'm stupid. So I guess the lesson is: always safe your dearest data people!

Click to shrink...

Tell them to give you your fucking drive back.

Send it to a data recovery company if it's important enough to you.

 

[maximumzero]

As soon as you get things back up and running sign up for Backblaze. $60 for a year or $110 for 2 years of unlimited online backups.

Local backups are important too, and definitely do those as well, but having an online backup in case of extreme scenarios is paramount.

I basically go with Backblaze, Time Machine via Portable USB Hard Drive, and yearly clones via Backblaze.

That being said, I personally get too crazy with backups sometimes to the point where I stress about it.

 

[Duxxy3]

As soon as you get things back up and running sign up for Backblaze. $60 for a year or $110 for 2 years of unlimited online backups.

Local backups are important too, and definitely do those as well, but having an online backup in case of extreme scenarios is paramount.

I basically go with Backblaze, Time Machine via Portable USB Hard Drive, and yearly clones via Backblaze.

That being said, I personally get too crazy with backups sometimes to the point where I stress about it.

Click to shrink...

It all sounds crazy until you lose hundreds of thousands of files and have a corrupt single backup.

A few tips for all:

Raid is not a backup solution. Backup to an in-house solution for convenience, and then backup again somewhere else, preferably 50+ miles away in case of disaster.

 

[xxracerxx]

BackBlaze for life!

 

[Wraith]

I'm horrible about backups. I've bought external drives in the past, but didn't bother to use them, or found the associated software annoying. Now that my upload speed is slightly less horrible than it used to be, I've been looking at online backup services.

IDrive has some good reviews, and lets you back up as many devices as you want on a single account/plan. Backblaze, Carbonite and CrashPlan are pricier if you want to back up multiple PCs. I was going to say IDrive has a lot of bad reviews on TrustPilot, but seems like they all get bad reviews there (1.5-2.5 stars average). SOS lets you do 5 PCs on all their plans, but gets expensive based on capacity.

Anyone have online backup services they like? EDIT - Okay I took my sweet time posting this, will have to look through the replies above.

EDIT2 - Backblaze offers multiple threads for backups, and does 2FA. Doesn't let you backup Program Files/system files (which probably isn't a big deal for me). A review I was reading said IDrive didn't do 2FA, but looks like it was added late last year.

Thinking about it, if I went with Backblaze on my main PC, I could maybe make do with something like OneDrive on other devices. I'm not looking for multi-device syncing, just want to make sure files are backed up. But main PC is the vast majority of my data anyway. The one thing they keep mentioning about Backblaze is simplicity, which might be a benefit. I know I'll want to exclude some drives/folders (I don't need all my game installs backed up), but I mostly want something that's set-it-and-forget-it.

IDrive software also supports backing up to local device, while Backblaze is cloud only (it can back up from external drive to the cloud).

 

[VorpalNonsense]

As for my own method, I do manual physical backups to a large external drive irregularly at my leisure, but I also have only my most important stuff backed up externally to a cloud account.

 

[Swig]

If you don't have TBs of data, I would suggest Google Drive.. They give you a decent amount for free and for $2-$3 per month, you can get 100+ GB of cloud data. It's great for storing photos and other things that likely won't take up TBs of data.

 

[sangreal]

It probably isn't all unrecoverable yet (unless some botched attempts were made to save the drive). get the drive back

and sign up for backblaze or something, geeze. It's the era of the cloud, there is no reason to ever lose photos let alone the rest of your stuff

 

[joecanada]

100GB of Google Drive is like £16/yr and it's super easy to get it to backup your desktop/pictures/documents. There's no reason to not be backing up these days.

Edit: also, when it comes to photos, Google will let you backup lots of stuff for free (thought not at original quality, unless they come from like a Pixel phone or something).

Click to shrink...

Alternately you can create multiple Google accounts just for the drive. My 2 year old has one with all her pics

 

[ChippyTurtle]

Hi OP, I work in IT and this is my two cents

Fuck that shit.

Get your hard drive back and search for special labs / companies that do data recovery. I have a hard time believing a PC repair shop would have the expertise to determine if your hard drive cannot be recovered in any way.

Also - Use Google Photos for free backups of pictures (not at original quality).

Click to shrink...

Isn't that expensive? (Obviously, the value of the photos come into play as well as finances)

 

[FernandoRocker]

Google Photos is completely free and offers completely unlimited backup for photos and videos. It works in the background; you don't have to do anything.

And it works on Android, Windows, iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, etcetera.

 

[ElectricKaibutsu]

I do Google Photos for photo backups and backblaze for everything else.

 

[hjort]

For what it's worth, when my old laptop died and corrupted my HDD a few years back I managed to salvage practically all of my photos, texts, the vast majority of my music collection and some shorter video clips by using data recovery software.

I had bought a SATA/IDE to USB adapter, hooked my HDD up to a new computer and started the data recovery. It took a whole day, but it worked. I had no previous experience of doing any of this prior to my recovery attempt, so there's still hope, I think.

 

[BLEEN]

I have a hard time believing a PC repair shop would have the expertise to determine if your hard drive cannot be recovered in any way.

Click to shrink...

When in doubt. The answer is always yes. But bring it to a pro. If an HDD starts clicking on me, I pull it and put it aside as to not 'cause further corruption. An SSD is another story entirely. Pretty sure when those go, they go. Guess that's the one good thing about HDDs; they can almost always be salvaged for contents.

 

[finalflame]

Good way to learn a hard lesson.

 

[efr]

Google gives unlimited photo backup space. Do it for shit like this.

 

[kvetcha]

Gotta say, even though I do local backups, this thread got me to go sign up for Backblaze.

 

[sweetmini]

If by getting an external housing/cable for your drive it is recognized by your system (the controller still responsive), and the drive manages to read data, you can try using recovery tools like RECUVA or paid alternatives (i had success with GetDataBack way back when, i didn't use Recuva, other era members will help i am sure with their tool of choice suggestion).
i don't know if linking to the tool is allowed, but here is wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuva

Your luck might vary depending on the tech and how full the drive was... files may not be whole anymore.
To make things simple, imagine if you have a big book, your HDD, and chapters are your files. your little 2 yo cousin took it and tore all pages off...
Your HDD metadata that has been most probably lost is the bottom page number.
If the lil cousin shuffled the pages... the tool may not be able to reconstruct the chapter, it might catch the beginning but lose track of the rest and combine the wrong pages.
The tool with find the pages, in the order it can guess the best and put the chapters all back if it can, even without the page numbers.

Like all images it's imperfect (in reality you might be a little silly yourself and changed all page numbers to random numbers, but you wrote on a lost piece of paper the correct order to follow, which your cousin completely chewed)



If you cannot self recover what's most dear, you can ask for a recovery service estimate, but you then pay per size recovered and what they have to do to recover. They will change the controllers, reconstruct a new drive with your platters -if it's physical-, commission the manufacturer to remount the chips to a salvage unit if it's SSD etc.

 

[Zarathustra]

I've got Dropbox and everything important is in there. There are probably cheaper alternatives too.

thinking about it, Dropbox is my main one and the only one I pay for. I also use MEGA as my second (have a legacy 50GB plan for free), OneDrive and Google Drive too.