If you\u2019ve had the good (!) fortune of working with me for more than 5 minutes you\u2019ll know I\u2019m not the biggest fan of IT and the way it\u2019s implemented at home and in the office to \u201cimprove\u201d our lifestyles. Too often I\u2019ve been on-site to implement or, perish the thought, have spent some of my own cash on software or hardware that promised so much and delivered so little. So I find it hard that I, like a number of my colleagues, friends and family invest so much in data availability. We put all of our music and movies and photos on computers. We don\u2019t print out photos any more, we put them on digital displays. We don\u2019t buy CDs, we buy the songs online. And happily ignore the prompt to back it up thinking that we\u2019ll do that \u201csome other time\u201d. But then we have too much data to back up to DVD+-R, so we rely on external hard drives or just think it will never happen to us.<\/p>\n
So when my father-in-law rang me a few weeks ago to say that he\u2019d thought he\u2019d lost \u201ceverything\u201d I was thinking to myself that this was another typical end-user IT experience. He is a keen photographer and has been collecting photos, documents and other assorted data since Windows 95 was a twinkle in Bill Gates\u2019 eye. He was an early adopter of Recordable CD so that he could back up his data, but was bitten a few times down the track by reliability issues. In the last few years he has been travelling quite a bit, and used an external drive as the primary repository for his data. He got nervous about having everything in one place and bought a second drive to act as backup for the first. Which is a good idea as far as it goes. Unfortunately, for reasons I\u2019m still not entirely clear on, this second drive had become \u201cfull\u201d and so he formatted it to make room for his next backup. Which generally just involves a Windows Explorer Drag and Drop activity. He had eschewed the bundled Retrospect HD Express in favour of a more granular approach which I kind of understand, having been the victim of semi-proprietary backup formats in the past.<\/p>\n
The problems started when, after quick-formatting his backup drive, he went to copy his data to the backup drive and the primary drive failed. I asked him if he had copies on DVD, as we\u2019d discussed this previously. He didn\u2019t because the Nero software he had obtained had stopped working and he didn\u2019t have time to look into it. I cussed under my breath (I think) and asked if he had anything he could recover from. No, he didn\u2019t, and what can we do to get it back? So I asked Google what other poor schmucks had used and forum post results were variable to say the least.<\/p>\n