Streetlife

Tracey R

Techie advice on failed external hard drive sought

I know there are a few of you more technical IT folk here on Streetlife, so I'm hoping you can tell me whether my external hard drive (5 & 1/2 years old) which has failed, can have the data restored/retrieved from it?

Fortunately I take double backups so don't THINK I've lost anything, but as my backups are so important for my business I'd rather try & make sure if I possibly can.
It just suddenly stopped working on Monday - my PC is showing it doesn't recognise the device (Western Digital "My Book")

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!
I'm with The Simple Web Company

Comments

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Tracey R
hmmm... I did the "girlie" thing of  switching off ;-) unplugged the hard drive (power and USB) and leaving it for 10 minutes & it seems OK now... this despite having removed the USB before.
But I'd still be interested if anyone knows if data from these devices CAN be retrieved in the event of a failure...

And yes I will be getting a new one as I reckon 5 & 1/2 years is about the maximum life I'm likely to get from this drive... no point taking chances when this could be a warning!
I'm with The Simple Web Company
Brian s
Yes Tracey, Clever Trevor on Totterdown Street does data recovery.  Its not cheap but Trevor is good!  His number is 8672 6039.  The shop name is actually Staples Computing and it is run by Serena and Trevor.  I cannot recommend them enough as they have saved my digital photos more than once after hard drive failures.
Shahid Rafiq
Hi Tracey,

Yes you can retrieve data from external hard drives. It depends on whats wrong. If its a power issues then its quite easy to boot it up if you know what you are doing otherwise if its hard disk itself then you need a specialist to do it and its expensive (nearly £100). I have used Trever as well a couple of times and hes done a good job and would use him again for data recovery if I am stuck.

Shahid Rafiq
Another thought why dont you do online backups?
Tracey R
Thanks Brian & Shahid, great to know about Trevor for future reference.

Shahid, I've thought about online but with nearly 1.5Tb of data it becomes rather expensive - but I think I should identify core elements & back them up online e.g. customer files.
(And I should probably have a disk cleanup too ;-)
I'm with The Simple Web Company
Shahid Rafiq
hi Tracey,

Yeh.. i will use him in the future.. i just don't have time to start faffy around with complex stuff like that.. and he has the hardware already setup.

Phew thats a hell of lot data but i am sure there will be backups of backups etc or files you dont need which can go on an external harddrive and forgotton about. I use Mozy at all my clients and its very good and is backed by Vmware and Emc2 which are big companies in the IT world. Please feel free to give me a call if you want to discuss mozy.

Shahid
Tracey R
Thanks for the recommendation Shahid but have looked at Mozy in the past - they would charge me £240 (A MONTH!!!) vs. £12.50 with Amazon S3; guess which I prefer ;-) Appreciate your kindness in suggesting solutions.
I'm with The Simple Web Company
Matthew G
Tracey - check out crashplan.com

Genuinely "unlimited" pricing, extremely good backup client, and if you have multiple machines (up to 10) they can all share a "family" account.

I used to use Mozy and threw them away after 5 minutes looking at Crashplan.

And my father has around 2TB of data (mostly photos and videos) he backs up with them (as part of my account); it took a long time - multiple weeks - to get the first backup completed but once that was done it's completely effortless and it then only backs up what has changed.
Shahid Rafiq
Matthew, looking at crashplan sounds good (althought there are quite a number of online backup companies which all do similar things and have different storage and pricing structure). My only concern with crashplan is that its all based in America and the support hours are different than. Space wise Mozy is expensive but i use it for my business clients who need the security and reliability of a company which is associated with major players in the IT world (VMware & Emc2). Also have you looked at the support section of Crash Plan?
Scott H
As others have said it depends on the reason the drive went down. There are lots of data restoration chaps out there but they charge an arm and a leg. I have used them when I've had to, thankfully not often. I've also used data retrieval software which has worked in the past where the data has become corrupt. Check out http://www.isobuster.com/

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