[Cussy]

As I mentioned in Jules' thread on her dead camera, I came back from St Abbs to find a dead hard drive. Now I am paranoid about backup, but still I thought I'd lost a months worth of photos. There were no diving ones, but the wife's holiday snaps were amongst them.

On boot, Windows XP would not recognise the hard drive and kept informing me that it wasn't formatted. A quick search on Google and I found a free phone number for a data retrieval company that could offer advice. They informed me that the Maxtor drive I have has a common fault that XP thinks is data based, but is infact a hardware fault. They informed me that because XP had auto run Chkdisk, there was every chance I'd lost all data. They offered to analyse the disk for £95 and extract the data, if possible, for a further £450.

Another search on Google found an internet-based data retrieval company that would perform the data analysis stage for free and then charge per GB for extraction. I ran the check, and this allowed me to know that all the photos were retrievable. The cost was $300.

So I thought there was every chance I could get the data off, so a final search on Google I downloaded about 10 demos and freeware for data retrieval. Unfortunatley none of the free ones worked, but a program called Restorer2000 let me extract files up to 64k, and these were all fine. So I invested the $50 and the end result was I got EVERYTHING back. At the end of the process, I was able to reformat the hard drive and it is now fine and works ok.

So the moral of the story is BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS. I've invested £50 in an external hard drive to act as a back up drive just for photos. DO NOT store all your photos on just one of these, as Jules' other horror story shows that if you drop that external hard drive, you will lose the lot - I've also had that happen. I also have a backup on DVD stored at my parents, just in case of fire at home.

So a quick search on Google brought the cost down from £545 to $50. I did loose virtually a week of spare time though.

Rob