I have a friend Paul from Raleigh (Cary, actually) who is pretty sharp. I don’t want to go into his degrees and grade point averages, but if you knew you would say “Wow”! Paul is a pretty sharp computer dude, perhaps in some ways even sharper than your consultant buddy here. (Paul reads these columns, so I have to be complimentary.)
Paul called me up the other night, in “the panic”. Now, “the panic” is something I see quite frequently these days. It is the look on someone’s face (or, voice on the phone) when they find out that their computer won’t run or that their hard drive has crashed. “The panic” is usually followed by “the anger” when you ask if they have backups, which they usually don’t.
Because Paul and I know each other, he managed to skip “the anger”. But, the sad fact was that Paul had only partial backups and needed some data on his hard drive that was now kaput. (For those technically inclined, his FAT was corrupted.) What to do?
I was aware that there are a number of service companies that can recover data from hard drive crashes. My brother-in-law in Denver who lost his laptop hard drive brought it to one of these and they managed to recover all of his important data. But it cost him (as I recall) about $700. Usually, they are not local (especially to Oak Island!) and so you end up removing your hard drive and sending it to them. So, the cost is high and the time delay can be significant.
Paul found a better offering, and from an old and established company in the field – Ontrack (www.ontrack.com). They provide a service called “Easy Recovery” that you can do yourself and at your home or place of business. The process works essentially like this:
They provide software to you, via download from the ‘net. The software is initially free, but is limited to analyzing your hard drive to see what can be recovered. Only if you decide that viable data can be recovered do you download (and pay for) the full version that completes the recovery process. The cost for a normal Win9x system is $179.
The software creates a bootable DOS diskette that you run if your hard drive cannot be booted. The program then runs and attempts to recover or correct the damage. One difficulty is that if the FAT structure of your hard drive is compromised (as Paul’s was), the program needs a place to put your data that is not bad. Usually this means having another hard drive or hard drive partition to store the data in.
Paul purchased the software and was very successful at recovering his data. It’s always nice to have a good ending to your story. By the way, Ontrack also offers a number of other recovery services, including the traditional lab recovery service.
The point is: it’s still better to have good backups. Paul spent $179 and a lot of time (and anxiety) recovering his data. Keep good backups and that won’t happen to you.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).