It died

The quantum fireball hard drive gave up. There goes my precious data..... AGAIN !! AARRRGGHHHH @#()*%&@$(

I once read an article from a woman that losing data is more painful than giving birth to a baby. So I'm like, giving birth to baby twice already... Somehow I don't feel so much of pain compare to the first time, which cost my 4 year college life, including all the projects, digitally scanned pic (that time digicam is still a rare item), contacts, emails, nude leng looi pic cute bunny/kitty/doggy pic, 5 GB of porn, scenery wallpaper, final year thesis, ...etc. It's like, part of me died as well during that time.

Despite my expert knowledge on hard drive, it only helps salvaging part of the data. Suppose tools like Norton Utilities could help recover corruption, bad sector and some minor problems, but for my case a continuous knocking sound from the drive shows that either it's a mechanical failure, contamination, drive too old, or reserved area corrupted. The only solution might be calling the data recovery experts like this who use clean room environment and tools to retrieve the data, and it gonna cost far more than a couple of new hard drive.

I use to get friends asking me for advice on hard drives. You see, the only way to prevent this is to backup your important stuff daily. The only thing stopping you from doing it is laziness, that explains why I lost my data. To make things simpler, I come out with a lifespan formula (boy I love formula...hehehe...) of the hard drive:

Hard disk life x 10 = human life

(suppose to be the approximately equal sign, but can't get it anywhere)

Basically hard drive is just like human. For example, if you bought your hard disk 6 years ago, the hard disk now is about 60 years old of human age, so you come and ask me whether you should start backup data, I'll say how much is the probability of human being live pass 60? Accident happens to human, so do hard drive. If you lucky to have a hard disk of 8 years, please run a scan disk (surface scan of course) throughout the whole disk, and you'll sure find some bad sectors, corrupted areas and so on, very similar to various sickness human would get when he/she is 80 years old.

If you are lucky enough, you hard drive might give out some signals before it died. Such as frequent hang, file corruption, auto restart, strange sound from hard drive, knocking sound from hard drive, blue screen/send error report. Don't be panic if it happens once a while because windows is very good in mimicking such symptoms to get your attention, just like a crying baby.

1. Why is data loss prevention so important?Data Loss can spell total disaster.
A study by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C.
showed that if a disaster causes companies to lose their data for 10 or more
days, 50% of them file for bankruptcy almost immediately following the loss, and
another 43% will file for bankruptcy within a year.

2. How often should
I backup?The best policy is to backup all of your critical data every 24 hours.
This is the only way to ensure your latest work is fully backed up should you
ever need it.

Quoted from here.

Wow, like 7% of companies using just paper, no pc, no email, no notebook. I wonder the next terrorist attack will be targeting on servers either using bomb or hardcore virus, 93% of companies would just vanish, follow by an economy crisis.

So start backuping your stuff today, that's what your CD-R, DVD-R, blu-ray disc, and thumb drive are for, although it can be conveniently used for exchanging porn crucial information.