Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for April 24, 2013

and the lesson learned here is “flash drives are your friends”

Yeah, as long as you didn’t drop kick your hard drive you can just slap it in another machine. There’s a lot of services that do it pretty cheap, and they’ll put the data on a flash drive for you, or into a removable hard drive if it’s a lot of data. Oh, and next time, back up! Like I should, and I will, tomorrow, or real soon. Yeah, right.

I don’t get it . . I tried backing up my computer and it fell off the desk . . . with a crash . . .

One word Adam: Carbonate

Apple…It just works. LMAO

Take the hard drive out. Buy an external drive case, plug it into the USB port of a new computer and you’re in like Flynn.

This is the way I felt a couple of weeks ago, but my computer tech fixed the problem easily after the HP techs told me the data was permanetly gone

It won’t be on the hard drive if it hasn’t been being saved frequently while he was working on it! I get the feeling that’s what’s happened: none of his work had been saved to the hard drive during all the hours he had been working. Thus it’s unrecoverable by any means.Some programs will automatically back up your work at regular intervals while you’re working on it, but not all programs do that for you. If you’re using a program that doesn’t do that for you, then it’s all up to you to make sure you remember to keep saving often while you’re working!I usually remember to keep saving while I’m working, but that has happened often enough to me that I can sympathize with what’s happened to Adam. Farewell, volatile RAM data!

He’s talking about two months worth of work. Most of it should be salvageable. He just lost one days work. Trouble is, a lot of people don’t know any more about their computers than how to start & use a word processor.

It also depends on HOW the computer bit it. The hard drive could’ve died, which means whatever data was on said hard drive is pretty much toast. I mean, you can try to see if there’s anything to salvage, but in my experience a loss of hard drive is a loss of everything, usually.

The thing is, none of us know exactly how Adam’s computer bit it, so until we do, I’m just going to assume without questions that there is no way to get the data back.

Remember when backups were made to floppy disks? Took all night to do it. Backups didn’t get done a lot then. Of course, the hard drive was only a few hundred megabytes or less.

I have had drive failures twice that I took to Fry’s and they got all the data off and onto DVDs for me. Programs, no; data yes.

Wish we could edit our comments. Anyway, I remembered when my hubby was working on something important for a client for hours. He was Saving in the beginning but then forgot to continue doing so. Around 1-2 a.m. I popped in and said it was late and he should come to bed. He agreed and before he could think to hit Save he shut off the computer. All those hours were really gone and the next day he had to go back and do it over.

Looks like Adam is down for the count, too, and not just the computer.

I know a fellow who sometimes makes up to five backups. In three different states, just to be sure one will survive.

In the old days- way back in 1980 I used to back up a 75,000 word manuscript onto 3.5" floppies …several copies as I was paranoid about breaking them!

I can remember when computers didn’t have hard drives!Remember B drives?

And of course the 1541 drive with its 170K floppy disks (unless you cheat and put a notch in the other side).

My daughter once lost a long school report when her almost brand new SSD died. I mean DIED. It was totally non readable. (no she didn’t back up the data – learnt from this). Got a new SSD for free and that one died last month (just past the 2 year warranty of course). Not getting a new SSD quite yet…