Sectorgame

CamInHead wrote:I don't know what you guys are doing with your PCs but I've never lost a hard-drive.

*looks at the general air made in this thread, then cringes*

I mean, damn! That has to hurt.

...And so, we go offtopic again...

Don't count your chickens, then. Just by virtue of being a constantly-moving part, hard drives receive the most wear and tear of any component in a system, and even a quality drive will wear out over a long-enough lifetime. I know that I didn't do anything particularly special to my machine before my hard drive started to fail...though the fact that it's a Dell probably explains a lot of the problem.

you can recover data from a dead drive, but its pricey

HOW!? SPEAK, FOR GOD SAKES!

Bribe an NSA agent.

https://services.seagate.com/online_request_form.aspx

places like staples (not best buy, geeksuck doesnt do it) can do in store attempts for usually less money (~$250) but they wouldn't work on something like physical damage, but would be refunded if it didnt work...

it really depends on how much you value the data, and whether it was porn and some freespace files, or family picures you could never get back...

for reference, staples prices are $250 for an in store attempt, $1000 for a segate logical attempt, and $1500 for a segate physical recovery (when done through staples they'll show you what was recoverable and a price before you actually have to pay it or get the data so you dont end up paying like 100 for 4 pictures of a walrus humping a seal from the internets or something)

End of the day it's just data, that can be created again from scratch if necessary. Same for family pictures. What's important is you

Hunter wrote:End of the day it's just data, that can be created again from scratch if necessary. Same for family pictures. What's important is you

Family photos recreated from memory have a good chance of being at least 50% more awesome than the originals anyway.

The lost original may have just been you and your parents in front of the Grand Canyon but in the recreation you can all be dressed up as pirates or about to rappel off the edge or something.

i want what you're having

Well photographs are a bit of a gray area - It's easy to backup hundreds of them on a single disc, so you can't complain much about losing them in that kind of situation if you never made any efforts to back them up or print them out at the very least. I have no family photos with me sadly, as the majority of them were taken before the digital camera revolution.

I'm half-toying with the idea of using our printer/copier/scanner's negative-scanning function to start digitizing the reams of old film rolls we have lying around here. Though I should probably try to resolve the unorganized mess that is the family's semi-backed-up digital camera archive first...

Oh, and no more scare mongering about hard drives. It's frightening enough of a prospect as it is!