The Day I Lost all My Data

But did the possibility ever enter your mind that one day you may wake up and find that your reliable machine – that faithful companion of years – has gone dead on you. It has entered into a deep coma and, horror of horrors, it has taken all your data with it.

 

This nightmarish scenario became a reality for me recently. It is usually an incident that teaches you some valuable lessons that you do not forget in a hurry for the rest of your life.

 

I am a writer. Since the last one and a half years I have been burning the midnight oil, researching and writing a book under contract with a reputed publisher. The deadline is cast in stone and there is a lot of money riding on the project.

 

As I sat last month to finish the last chapter of the book, I heard a crunching noise coming from my hard drive and the PC crashed. It just blacked out completely. I tried to restart it and the same ominous noise from the CPU cabinet was heard, this time only louder.

 

My heart sank and suddenly the world grew silent for me. What I was looking at was a total catastrophe. Eighteen months of hard work and suddenly it went out of my reach, lost in the wilderness of cyberspace. I had no idea what happened to it or where it was! I panicked as I remembered the contract with the publisher. The deadline was just a fortnight away!

 

I phoned a friend who has a way with all things technical. “You have been ditched by your hard drive!” he said. “Did you take a backup?”

 

Backup? What backup? Who in the world takes a backup? You just finish working on the computer, save your file and move on. My friend then enlightened me about this backup phenomenon which apparently was the mantra for smart computer users.

 

I realised that taking backup of one’s work is the most sensible thing one can do if one is saving vital data on a computer hard drive. The drive is a result of an incredibly high level of precision engineering. Though it is made quite rugged and lasts for years, it still has limited working life. And the day that life ends, all hell breaks loose for the user.

 

But there is still hope, my friend informed me. Losing data is so common in the world that a whole industry has cropped up in the last two decades that specialises in data recovery through special tools and software. It is quite amazing what kind of mess they are able to recover data from – crashed or reformatted hard drives or those devastated by a virus attack, computers totally damaged by fire, floods or electricity surges, notebooks run over by trucks, buildings flattened by earthquakes.

 

I rushed to my friend’s house, used his computer to google for data recovery companies and that is how I got to know of Fields Data Recovery (FDR), the pioneers in the area.

 

The best thing I liked about the ISO 9001-certified FDR is their policy of “your data back fast or pay nothing.” The company has over 15 years of experience behind it and routinely manages to recover data that other recovery companies have labelled an impossible task. I was also reassured by the fact that they have been selected by such giants as IBM and the US Deptt. Of Defense for data recovery work and have been approved by all leading hard-disk makers of the world.

 

The damaged hard drive of my computer was taken by the FDR engineers for a free four-hour diagnostic checkup. It was a major relief when I was informed that almost all the data on the drive was recoverable.

 

After running diagnostics, the disk was apparently opened by the FDR experts in a Class 100 Clean Room. This is an enclosed space with filtered air where the microscopic dust particles suspended in the room are not allowed to exceed the count of 100 in a cubic foot of air.

The disk was dismantled, its magnetic platters exposed, and every millimeter of their surface was read by special machines and software that precisely recreated those magnetic patterns elsewhere, thus duplicating all the data.

 

The next day, I was handed over the lost data that existed on the hard disk neatly copied on half a dozen DVDs. I can tell you that there are few joys in the world that give better pleasure than receiving your two years worth of work output back safe and sound. All my problems were solved and I could sleep easier that night. And the FDR services came at a price that did not burn a hole in the pocket.

 

Lesson Learnt

 

The lesson I learnt from this episode was that computers are digital machines with a lot of components that are marvels of modern electronic engineering. And, like any other machines, they are prone to go belly up occasionally. I have since made it a habit to take a backup of my vital data every night and save it on a DVD disk. But still things may go wrong with the data and I may be unable to retrieve it for a variety of reasons. (For example, what if there is a fire that consumes both the computer as well as the backup CDs?) For such cases, there is always FDR.

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