Post #86 Daniel
Post #19 Kevin
Post #22 Andy S

Congrats! And thanks to all that entered

My four year old Systemax let me down last June. I should have heeded all the warning signs but dummy-me thought that noise coming from the tower was a dirty fan.

When it failed to boot that morning, I tried everything to recover my iTunes and pictures. I had an old iTunes backup but a small fortune of iTunes were lost in the crash. The pictures, totally gone, including the photos of my brother’s wedding that I had uploaded from my camera to the computer and then erased off my camera’s memory card. My husband still tears up over the geneaology data he had in his Family Tree Maker software that hadn’t been backed-up yet. I had to call everyone in the family and all my friends in order to get their addresses again since my address book was loaded on the computer and I have no hard copy address book. There are still people that I haven’t been able to contact since I didn’t have their phone numbers memorized and they live far away. I’m still hoping they contact me so we can reconnect.

I was in the process of cloning my hard drive when a sudden, severe storm blew in. Confident that my UPS would protect my system from any possible surges, brownouts, etc, I let the cloning process continue. Moments later, however, lightning struck a high-voltage transformer a few feet outside the window, causing it to blow. The system instantly lost power, though the UPS continued to power the monitor and other peripherals plugged into it. Hoping the UPS had just failed to power the tower, it was not until the power was restored that I discovered the motherboard, both hard drives, and one of the optical drives were fried. Later testing seemed to indicate that the surge had not passed through or damaged the UPS…the tower was simply too close to the transformer when it blew.

At the time I only had one external hard drive, resulting in the loss of the lone clone. However, the CD backup maintained my hope of restoration. After rebuilding the computer I browsed the contents of the CD only to find my hopes shattered…nearly half of the files were reported as unreadable. Despite passing a verification scan after the disc’s initial burning, my failsafe betrayed me as I learned the disc was faulty. It was then I learned lightening does strike the same place twice, figuratively speaking.

I have been maintaining multiple copies of each backup/clone ever since, and as a result have had but a few lost files since. Nevertheless, one of those FreeAgent Go portables would be extremely useful as I have reached the capacity limits of my current drives and am once again approaching a state of vulnerability. Please Julie, help me avoid a return to such a precarious situation!

So one morning we’re still in bed and she’s reading an article (on Dicken’s criticism of Victorian pedagogy in his book “Hard Times” I think) while I slipped in and out of consciousness beside her. Seeing how comfortable I looked she decided to put the laptop away and curl up with me before getting up to officially start the day. She woke me up and passed me the laptop to put on the ground beside me so she could curl up… the problem was that I was not fully awake, and as I went to put the laptop down I let go and it flew across the room, bouncing on the floor twice before coming to a rest about 6 feet from the bed…

Needless to say I was fully awake at that point. The laptop powered on and appeared to have survived the flight… but after I left for work it started making that horrible clicking sound and eventually gave up. A new hard drive later and her computer was good as new. Unfortunately there was nothing recoverable on her hard drive… she lost all of her music and a lot of her academic work from the last 3-4 years. Scrounging around on Gmail and her storage space at school we were able to find about 25% of her work but the rest has been lost forever. Being starving students I have been forced to share my external hard drive for mutual backups, but space is running out quickly…

So yeah… that’s my data nightmare… ironic considering I’m known as the one who fixes things among all my friends and co-workers, yet in the case I was the bringer of death for my beloved’s data!

A doctor’s laptop died. Not a big deal, just re-image it and we’re good to go. Right? Wrong. Very Wrong.

Background Information:
We use a ‘single sign on’ program to keep track of doctor’s passwords for them. They have a half-dozen or more, so once they’ve logged into windows it enters the passwords for them. The only hitch in the giddyup is that every once in a great while, it will issue a challenege question to the user. This question? “Where were you born?” (They entered in the answer to this question when they were hired). If they can’t answer that, it won’t enter in their passwords for them.

So this doctor got her new laptop and logged in. It asked what city she was born in. SHE COULD NOT REMEMBER THE CORRECT ANSWER. She tried several times, but could NOT remember what the answer was. And these are important passwords, not the kind that you want people to steal, so there is NO WAY to reset that password. I had to manually reset every password that her computer had been remembering for her for years.

This is more of an application loss than a file/data loss, but that’s not in the rules : P

As the computers migrate, the current user usually pulls off the most important stuff onto some handy hard drive before passing it down. Then that data can be copied onto their “new” computer and the hard drive sits as a back up.

Then the fire.

Actually, it was just a problem with the electric powerline into the house. Nothing really burned except some extension cords. Did you know that electricity enters a house by two 110 volt wires? And if they short, then your household wiring is suddenly passing 220 volts? I didn’t know that. And the computers either didn’t know or didn’t care because they all went to permanent sleep mode.

Just one of the hassles with cleaning up the mess was the realization that our backup system was not a backup system at all. What we had saved on those (thankfully unplugged) hard drives was partial and out of date. Pretty much everything we had gathered on our current computers since the last migration died with them. And what we had saved on the hard drives was documents without the programs that handled them.

There was wailing and gnashing of teeth.

We need a better system. Something to make back up complete and easy.

Know anything like that?

Very painful and very embarrassing for someone who’s been using computers since the 80s.

Well, naturally, I was lazy and saved my files to the disk and didn’t bother to keep a backup on my computer’s hard drive. While walking across my apartment’s parking lot one morning, I had a backpack malfunction and half of my stuff fell out, including that zip disk. Before I could retrieve it, someone barreled through the parking lot and ran it and one of my expensive college books over. >_< My work was gone. Fortunately, I still had a few days before an assignment was due, so the worst aspect was just having to do it all over again. I made backups after that.

I have an HP Slimline PC tower that I kept on the top of my desk. While I was working on my college assignments I decided to take a break because I was tired of typing. I had just gotten off my computer and my younger three-year old sister quickly ran underneath the desk. She started playing with the wires and I quickly went to stop her but it was too late because she had moved the wire and my HP Slimline PC fell down. I turned on my HP Slimline PC and heard some clicking noises and my PC just showed a blank screen. I searched up my problem online and found out that my hard drive had died. I looked up some hard drive recovery services online and saw that it would cost thousands of dollars to recover all my family pictures, school data, and many other documents from my hard drive. I couldn’t afford to pay thousands of dollars just to recover a hard drive because I could of gotten a new computer for that amount so I just had to figure out another way to recover all the data. I saw an article where someone mentioned that they had managed to recover their data by “freezing their hard drive”. I was a bit skeptical but I noticed a lot of people commenting that this worked with their hard drive. I put my hard drive in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and my family thought I was weird when I did that and they were all laughing. When I took the hard drive out after 10 hours I opened the case of my computer and plugged in the hard drive. I started my computer and it turned out that the hard drive didn’t work! I couldn’t afford to purchase a service to recover all my data so the only choice I had was to purchase a new hard drive to do my school work. I purchased a new hard drive from New Egg and my computer started working again. I save all my important word documents a hard drive now, and I’ve brought an extension wire so I don’t have to put the slimline PC on my desk any more. If I won a Seagate portable hard drive it would make a lot of things easier for me and I could carry my work wherever I need and not worry about loosing it. Thanks for holding this contest The Gadgeteer and I look forward to seeing if I win or not.

-barbarabaker

If I do win this contest, I’m sure going to use one of these babies well

Thanks for the excellent contest!