Pay for an External Hard Drive or Pay Through the Teeth

Last year, I had an iBook that crashed.

Man, I don't know what happened to it. The mac repair guys said the screen fried, the arms that read the data on the hard drive fried, parts of the motherboard fried and a few other things went wrong that sounded like my computer was completely dead and unrepairable. Well, it could have been repairable, but I could just buy a new laptop.

Well, it would have all been fine (except for not having a laptop anymore) because I was only using that machine to work on jobs when I was away from home. Once I get home, I tranfer the data to my desktop machine.

But there was one thing I had not archived anywhere. In fact, this information was nowhere else...just on my laptop. It was my accounting.

All my invoices, tax info, outstanding accounts, job time worksheets, everything. I use excel files to track and work out all that stuff. Excel is pretty cool that way.

Well, I would have just written it off, but I had no idea who owed me money, who I had invoiced, how many hours I had been tallying for clients. Ugh.

So I called a recovery place (DriveSavers). Wow, it's expensive. My little 40Gb hard drive was going to cost me about $3000 to recover, but all I needed was a few excel files. Little tiny 100kb files. Man, I tried everything.

I told them all I needed was a few small files, but they couldn't just look for those. Apparently those files don't look like Excel files to a hard drive recovery team in a clean room.

My biggest problem was that I couldn't afford to pay for it because I needed to invoice some clients first, but since I had no idea how much they owed me, I couldn't invoice them.

I got a couple of discounts and ended up paying just $1600.

Well, I had some money come in and I payed for it. They had actually called me and told me everything was recovered, but I asked them to hold on to them for a few weeks until I could afford it. They did. They were very nice.

What a pain, though. I guess this is probably a good advertisement for using an online accounting and invoicing system.

Or, buying an external hard drive. That's what I did.

Here's the thing, you still have to copy over your information every once in a while. Don't put this off either.

I got a 230Gb Western Digital MyBook for pretty cheap. Those things are getting so inexpensive these days.

So, if you haven't done it yet, be afraid. It could happen right after you read this post.

Go and archive your stuff right now.

By the way, if it does happen, DriveSavers is really a good company to go with. They were super friendly on the phone, and ended up giving me quite a bit of discount. I'm not saying they will give you a discount, but if you're gonna send your crashed drive off somewhere, give them a shot. It'll probably cost just as much somewhere else. Their customer service was great. I got 4 DVDs with all my stuff on it all organized and packaged up nicely.

Also, part of what convinced me about them was their Hall of Fame, or celebrities they have helped. Check it out. Simpsons, Sting, Willie Nelson, Pixar, ILM among others. It can happen to anyone...and does happen.

Hope this helps.

What do you think?
1. Have you ever had to get a drive recovered?
2. Do you use an external had drive?
3. Are you archiving right now?

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