Preserving your Memories After a Hard Drive Failure
Of all of our possessions, family photos are perhaps the most precious. They are so precious that many people cite them as the one thing they would want to save (other than pets and family, of course) if their house was on fire. Today, the majority of our photos is taken with digital cameras and is immediately transferred to our hard drives for storage.
In the old days of film cameras, we had an automatic back-up copy after the film was developed. It was called a negative, and as long as we had the negative, we could always get more pictures printed up to replace any that were lost or damaged. These days, we’re not so lucky. If we want a back-up copy of our digital photos, we have to take some extra actions.
Some people burn a CD-ROM or a DVD-r every time they empty the camera onto the hard drive, but these are the minority of digital camera users. Most people just store them on the hard drive and leave them there. A few select photos may get emailed to relatives, but for the most part, we keep only on single copy stored in one single location.
Unfortunately, hard drives have a limited lifespan. If the hard drive is the only place we store our photos, then all of those precious family photos have a limited lifespan as well. If a hard drive lasts five years, with daily use, then it’s beating the odds. Once it fails, it becomes unreadable and you can no longer access anything that was stored on the drive, including your irreplaceable family photos.
In many cases, however, it is possible to recover those photos and other important files from your failed hard drive. Unfortunately, most people have never heard of data recovery, the process that might help them recover files from their failed drive. Data recovery services are able to extract data from hard drives and other digital storage media that is unreadable by ordinary means. Whether it has failed, been damaged physically, been corrupted by a virus, or even accidentally erased, a good data recovery house can still get at the data that was stored on the drive.
Data recovery is not a free service, but when you consider the sentimental value of the family photos that are locked up on that defective hard drive, it’s a bargain. Data recovery is one area where you don’t necessarily want to go with the lowest priced option. Unskilled data recovery technicians can actually cause more damage to the hard drive making it even more difficult to get your photos back. Worse yet, is that many of the lower quality data recovery houses will charge you whether they give you back your files or not. Quality data recovery companies recognize that you are paying for results not just the old college try. If they can’t get your files back for you, the top data recovery houses won’t charge you a dime.
Of course, the best way to make sure you don’t lose your family photos is to make regular back up copies of all of your files, or to make 2 duplicate photo CDs of every new set of pictures as soon as they are transferred to the hard drive. Then if something does happen to the hard drive, you’ve got everything you need stored away ready to be reloaded on a new hard drive.