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Listen to the podcast: Disk Crash: a backup
and recovery story. 
Transcript
This is Leo Notenboom for askleo.info.
I had a hard disk crash recently, and I thought it might be interesting to review what happened and what I've done since to try and recover my data.
The disk is a 300 gigabyte external Maxtor USB drive to which I regularly backup some data, and on which I maintain my music library and images of product CDs for ready access.
One day Windows simply reported that it could not read the drive; that the data had been corrupted.
My first thought was to run SpinRite to locate and repair any physical defects on the drive itself. SpinRite ran for several hours and told me the drive was just fine.
Of course it wasn't, but this ruled out a true hardware crash and pointed to simple data corruption.
I pulled out a copy of Acronis Disk Director to attempt to repair the partition table, thinking that might be the next logical place for a failure. Acronis found nothing to repair, the partition table was fine. That implied that the actual disk directory structure - NTFS in this case - had somehow become garbled.
I found an interesting utility called "Get Data Back". Running that for several hours recovered what I'd estimate to be about 50 to 70% of the data on the drive. I copied that off and decided to call it quits there.
You see, recovering the drive was an exercise in convenience. Most everything on that drive was duplicated elsewhere: the mp3's were ripped from my CD collection, the iTunes downloads were being backed up nightly to another drive, product and other CD images were just that; images of CDs that I had sitting around elsewhere. Recovering what I could was a time saver, but not much more.
There are two lessons here that I think make this story worthwhile:
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Stuff happens. You will at some point, when you least expect it, lose the contents of a drive.
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The only truly reliable way to recover is to have backups.
Yes, I was able to recover some of my data directly from the drive, but not all. The fact that everything was backed up in some form or another is what saved me.
As to why this happened: I suspect, but can't yet confirm, that putting three external USB and Firewire drives on a single machine confused the USB and Firewire adapter I was using. Something didn't get transferred properly that should have.
But that's only a guess.
In the mean time I'm reformatting that drive, and once again reviewing my backup strategy just in case.
I'd love to hear what you think. Visit askleo.info and enter 11707 in the go to article number box to access the show notes, the transcript and to leave me a comment. While you're there, browse over 1,200 technical questions and answers on the site.
Till next time, I'm Leo Notenboom, for askleo.info.
Related:
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SpinRite - hard disk recovery, repair and maintenance tool
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Acronis Disk Director - hard disk partition management and recovery
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GetDataBack - data recovery software
Article C3099 - July 28, 2007
I second the point about "Get Data Back" . My clients rarely backup their data. "Get Data Back for NTSF" almost always gets back the important data anyway. It is cheap and you can download a non-recovery version to see if it will get anything for free.
Posted by: Dan Ullman at July 30, 2007 9:36 AMI've used GetDataBack for NTFS before as well.. You are right. It almost always allows you to recover up to 70% of the drive. The problem is, when the files are separate parts (example: extracted image of a cd). Some of the larger files may not be recoverable, therefor killing the entire extraction.
My #1 backup source is Norton Ghost 12. It makes it so ez to do backups automatically. I set it to back up 3 times a week at 5am when no one is on the comp. The bootable Norton Ghost 12 CD can read the backup images on network or local drives as well (yes I have 2 backup sources).
I do a lot of partitioning and when something goes wrong with Partition Magic 8 (it always does), it takes less than 8 minutes to recover my windows partition from the latest backup file!
Posted by: Chris at July 31, 2007 2:37 AMI have used Ontrack Easy Recovery twice now to recover all of the information on hard drives mounted in external trays. Windows XP and other operating systems reported the HD as unformated. It was formatted as NTFS. I used Format Recovery to copy all of the files and folders to another drive, then reformatted and copied them back.
The app shows files/folders as if using Explorer in Windows, and copying is just as fast. There are other recovery modes too, including Advanced, Deleted, and Raw. Saved me twice so far!
If you know a tech who has miniPE XT, there is a version of the app on the disc.
Posted by: Ron Lind at August 3, 2007 6:55 PMI have bin carryng for years a second drive (clone) in my car. I have cloned with Norton Ghost each 15 days until I found once that I cannot recover the files from the clone because Ghost didn't do the job. Then I switched to Acronis True Image (free for every Seagate and Maxtor owners! See at the Seagate and Maxtor URL). Since a couple of months I have a second backup drive installed in my PC. This second backup drive is only for files. I use FullSync (free) to backup automaticaly this files every x minutes.
Posted by: Jose at August 4, 2007 12:52 AMIf you have files that you deem *very* important, then a single backup is not sufficient. Plan on making both a local and an off-site copy.
Posted by: Michael Horowitz at August 5, 2007 11:10 AMI backup my main computer into 2 separate computers. My main computer has 4 disk, as well as the other 2 computers. All are backed up using rsync. USB/Firewire external drives are OK, as long as they are manageable and you know which hard drive is which. However, if too many hard drives to manage, better get an inexpensive PC and put all the hard drives in it.
Posted by: Fitz at November 4, 2007 9:35 PMGood point... Linux is better at recovering disks.. worked wonders for me...
found this newbie website with intstructions...
http://askrish.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Pankaj at December 25, 2007 10:57 AMGood point... Linux is better at recovering disks.. worked wonders for me...
found this newbie website with intstructions...
http://askrish.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Pankaj at December 25, 2007 10:58 AMGhost 12 does NOT work with Vista Ultimate when you try to recover. It appears to backup just fine but wait until you have a full system crash and have to install a new hard drive. It just doesn't restore with Vista Ultimate. I too have many back-ups at home, one I had used the Vista Back-up utility and did a full system back-up. After trying Ghost many times, I decided to try to recover from the many CD's I had from the Vista back-up. And it worked perfectly just time consuming because of all the CD's. My entire system was right back to where it was when I did the back-up, no issues at all. But I wish ghost worked with Vista better, it's works perfectly with my older XP machines.
Posted by: Frank at July 24, 2008 10:00 AMPLEASE HELP.
I have a desktop HP with Vista. Recently it would not boot ..called HP support, they were useless. Could not fix it.
Anyway here is my current situation, I backed up my personal files on 5 4.7GB dvd+r. followed the on screen instructions to create them, took me about 6 hours. Went through the recovery process, computer boots everything works.
Now iam trying to run the Backups I created, After I insert disc 1, it auto runs and states what files do you want to recover .. I click "next". it states please insert Disc # 5. And thats it. No matter what disc I put in, it pushes the disc out. Iam stock!
PLEASE DOES ANY BODY KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS???
16-Jun-2009