Thanks to Acronis, we have an Apple Watch Sport (black) and a copy of Acronis True Image backup software to give away worth a combined value of $559. To win the prize, simply tell us your data loss horror story — be it a business server catastrophe, a stolen mobile phone, or anything in-between. We also have nine copies of Acronis True Image up for grabs as runner-up prizes. Hop to it!
If you’ve ever spilled coffee on your laptop or lost your mobile phone, you probably remember the agony and the anxiety you felt knowing that the information was irreplaceable. A recent Acronis survey revealed that 1 in 3 Australians have suffered data loss and 47 percent of Australians fear losing photos and videos the most.
To enter the competition, tell us your data loss horror story. We’ll be rewarding the best anecdote with an Apple Watch Sport (valued at $429) and a copy of Acronis True Image backup software (valued at $129.99).
Nine runners-up will also bag themselves a copy of Acronis True Image backup software.
The Prize
First prize is an Apple Watch Sport and Acronis True Image backup software.
Nine runner-ups will receive a copy of the aforementioned Acronis True Image backup software.
How To Enter
To enter, simply share your data loss story in the comments section below. It could be a tale of consumer gadget woe or a business snafu involving customer data — the only rule is that it must have affected you personally.
Competition Details
• Competition closes 10:45am AEST on Tuesday 17 May 2016. Winners will be announced on site / contacted via email within 24 hours. Please ensure that your User Profile contains a valid email address.
• Entry open to all residents of Australia. Full terms and conditions.
Comments
128 responses to “WIN! An Apple Watch And Acronis True Image Backup Software”
I once accidentally formatted the wrong partition on the wrong drive on my computer when reinstalling Windows. The partition I deleted contained ALL of my backup files – game saves, photos, home movies, and, work documents. And this was the days before cloud storage or affordable external drives.
Ohhh I’ve done this before! After it I always quadruple checked before doing formats!
My partner’s toddler pulled on the cables of an external hard drive. It came crashing down to the floor along with all the photos of the children growing up. A valuable lesson about cloud storage was learned that day.
I was in the middle of an engineering team project at uni with a group of six guys. We had a final report for the semester (which was worth 25%). The document was editable in iCloud Drive, and we were pretty much finished. Then I made the mistake of deleting the file as I thought it was an old draft. Turns out iCloud Drive didn’t have data recovery at that point, so we had to start from scratch. Needless to say, we didn’t get 25% of the course marks, but I did get a lot more than 25% of hate from my team members!
My tale of woe happened a year ago. My backup/storage NAS box notified me of a failing drive so I bought a new one to replace it but when I replaced the failing drive the settings were set to format all drives so I lost 6TB of family computer backups as well as important pictures/documents/home videos. I was able to plug each drive in to an external case to slowly recover most of the data but it took two weeks before I had it back up and running.
I previously worked as a assistant network administrator for an accountant business, from time to time the IT Manager would get work experience kids in and dump them on me. I usually get them to do busy work, clean out the server room, audit computers etc… One of the jobs I usually get them to do is image new windows machines for deployment. I would run them through the process of prepping a machine, running through a check list of the software need to be install, how to create images for the different departments and then mass deploy machines using a previously build company image. The company was small and didn’t invest in a proper deployment software, so we were using a simple backup and restore process to deploy the machines from an external HDD. Anyway I showed the work experience kid how to image the machine, I supervised the second one and left him to do the rest, being near by if he needed me. After I left he came to grab me saying it wasn’t working anymore. He managed to deploy the image onto the external HDD, erasing all the current copies of the companies images. I spent the next few days re-creating new images for every department.
It was my first month working in IT. I had to reinstall Windows for one of the girls in the finance dept. I backed up all the data, being super careful to check for archaic financial software that loads onto the root of the C drive. Had the user check as well. After the install I went back to my desk and almost immediately the phone rang.
“How do I get back into my DOS partition?” I answered this question with a question of my own, “What DOS partition?”
Turns out the finance dept had some really old custom DOS software they used and the only copy happened to be on a dedicated partition on that computer. I had never even considered checking for something like that. I went back and tried to restore the data but it had been cleanly overwritten by the new Windows install. As I walked away from the cubicle after telling her the data was unrecoverable I heard the girl start to cry.
She was demoted, nearly fired and left a few months later. Part of her written job description was to back up the DOS software daily and store a copy in the safe. She hadn’t done so for more than a year.
I was never reprimanded, criticised or even questioned about it and I still feel bad today, almost 15 years later.
I was helping out a small office with some tech support a little while ago. A user was running out of space on their computer and required a backup / reinstall. I kicked off the transfer and everything went pretty smoothly. I then started deleting their user profile. This is where the mistake happens, the company were using a shared dropbox account for their work file server, this user had the dropbox app installed on their computer which was syncing all the data with their shared account. I deleted this data, the changes of course we replicated to dropbox emptying everything for all users.
Luckily I had just backed this data up on to an external but needless to say I had a rather pissed off small office unable to work for the afternoon.
I had an old external drive (750GB) that I had paid far too much for many years prior and I was certain would fail soon. So after getting a flashy new 1TB USB-powered external I decided I had better copy all of my data over (photos, movies, architecture work, business tax documents etc.) to the new one before the old one inevitably failed.
Not thinking, rather than ghosting or even doing a copy/paste I simply selected all folders, hit CTRL+X then pasted 700GB or so into the new drive.
A few hours into the transfer, while working from home, with around 100GB or so to go, AutoCAD had crashed which in turn took out windows explorer. Closing the cut/paste window. The data hadn’t yet pasted into the new drive however when I went back and checked the old drive it had cut from there fine… My stomach fell to my feet.
Alas, approx. 600GB gone. Thanks AutoCAD :(.
Mine happened in the days of windows 95. I was fixing a computer for a friend. and back in those days, that meant formatting drive and reinstalling windows. So I plugged his Hard drive into my machine Moved all his data he wanted to keep. Ran Fdisk utility and promply fdisked my hard drive with all his data and my data on it. From that day on I have always named my drives.
10 years ago, when my wife and I first got married, we moved to the UK and then went on a honeymoon to Venice and Rome. When we got back to the UK, we transferred all our photos to my old clunky iMac and being tech novices at the time, we didn’t even think we needed to back them up. As if fate had seen an opportunity, the very next day I switched on the computer and got a grey screen with a question mark flashing. We eventually got it working again but the photos were gone.
The saddest part was my picture of Shaquille O’neal touring the Vatican was gone! One in a million moment!
During my PhD we had a team of students and academics working on a big physics study for over a year, involving complex videos taken of micron sized patterns, very long and time consuming processes. Throughout the year we had gathered many terabytes of videos. The videos were labelled in a systematic way, and the experimental info was stored on a excel file, meaning that without the excel file all the data was essentially meaningless for analysis.
While we made regular and multiple backups of the video files, which took a long long time with all that data, we didn’t think so hard about backing up the key file.
And I was in charge of keeping track of the excel key file.
As you can imagine what happened next, in a stupid move one day when i was cleaning up my computer i managed somehow to delete the file, rendering the whole years work meaningless.
There was no recovery and i was very unpopular. It also put back mine (and others) graduations by over a year.
At least the second time around it was a little quicker to do and I made backups of *everything* regularly.
My story happened about a year and a half ago. I had recently purchased a NAS and had bought 4x2TB hard disks to hold all of my old photos and home movies (and my iTunes purchases). On this particular night, there was a major storm going on and my house kept losing power. After the power outages stopped, I discovered that my NAS had died (the power supply was fried) and 3 of the disks had died (they just didn’t work). Luckily I still had one 2TB drive that worked, right? WRONG – the data on the last disk was all corrupted.
I had the original photos and videos on the SD cards still, but I lost around $500 worth of data storage in one night. To make matters worse, I had to pay for a new power supply for the NAS because I was an idiot and forgot to register the NAS under warranty :/
I
My horror story is that of a saga with Segate’s notorious 3TB drives (desktop backup SotragePlus drives). Last year when I lost 9TB of my precious data comprising of
1. my wedding pics, pics from my first born, starting from year 2000 onwards
2. I started a new business and all my client’d data and many of my client’s server VM’s or VM images, vital to their business and mine.
3. my iTunes purchases and all my music, home movies and DVD (ripped and purchased over iTunes).
4. emails and documents, especially financial information.
the most stressful time of my life. The best part of that story is that I was running redundant backups and the 5TB drive used for Time Machine backup also failed (Seagate once again).
All the drives featured a death-click-click sound when the drives were plugged into the computers. I went and purchased some expensive software to salvage information and I was able to recover some but I am missing about 4 years of our life’s worth of pictures (and a lost wedding), home movies.
All my client and business information was lost never to be recovered. It took me 2 months to get back online, slowly installing and recovering information, piecing it by calling up clients and begging for extensions or redoing their lost work at my cost.
Seagate offered a peace offering and replaced all my drives for free and their support was excellent, but too little too late.
I still run backups, Time machine and manual (using scripts) to different drives (from different manufacturers) but its all manual and I cant seem to find a software that works and obviously Acronis is something I looked at but its expensive, especially when I am the business.
I still have nightmares and I think I have managed to get a handle on the backup scene but I wish it was easier. 🙁
I have backed up most of my DVDs onto an external hard drive on my computer, it means I can be lazy and don’t have to change discs/get another movie from the shelf, and if I want to rewind/fast forward/pause I don’t have to wait for the disc drive to catch up. When I first started backing up my DVDs I had maybe half of my library done (probably 200-ish). I would often watch them on my laptop in bed, and kept forgetting the hard drive was plugged in, I would get up and the hard drive would go flying onto the floor. After this happened several times the usb port on the drive was busted and when I was finally able to connect it the drive was corrupted and I couldn’t get any of my files. A couple of weeks worth of work on the computer wasted, not to mention all the other files I lost (pictures/old documents etc)
Back last year… I had booked an overseas trip to New Zealand and was so excited to go. I have a Synology DS13 and I had 2x 3TB drives and I had it set up in RAID 1. I had all my data (nearly) on it. A website that I had spent years writing that was fully functional which was an NFS share to my VMWare HV.. I had a backup of it but it was far older.. I had all my normal home usage files, plus movies and TV shows and music I had collected over the years on it… only really had around 2.5GB on it…. Either way.. It was ALOT of information. The day BEFORE I was leaving for my holiday, one of the HDDs on it failed. The other one was fine. But because it was RAID 1 it rendered both disks unusable. And the backup I did have was a while ago and split over a few HDDs and some were so old they drives didn’t work any more either. I lost A LOT of data that day and I spent the whole holiday angry and frustrated at myself for not being as vigelent with my backup process. I lost my website and much other data that day. Due to backups that were half backups and I couldn’t recover from such old data… *sigh*
During the first year of my computational biology PhD, I was still getting my head around the command line. The supercomputer that we ran all our analyses on generated two files from each analysis job – a .o standard output file and a .e standard error file. I was trying to clean up my folders as I had thousands of these standard error files. I typed ‘rm *e*’ …. and forgot the all important dot. As a result, I lost every file that had an ‘e’ in the file name. This included all of the evolutionary tree files I had spent months on, some of which took weeks to generate on the supercomputer. I then remember being horrified to discover that Unix has no recycle bin, and doubly horrified when I realised that I had not backed up many of those files. This small typo set me back weeks in my PhD.
Needless to say, I now backup my PhD work every day, and do ‘ls’ before ‘rm’ to make sure I’m deleting only what I want to delete!
It was about 3:00 am the night before a major assignment was due, As I was a slacker, I had only started writing the assignment earlier that night, but I was getting tired. I decided that was enough and would proof read it in the morning and then submit. I closed word and then clicked no to that little annoying pop up that always comes up.
The next morning I come back to the computer, looking for my assignment, turns out that little annoying pop up was asking me if I would like to save before closing word. Turns out I hadn’t saved at all during the night so I lost the whole document, this was about 8 – 9 years ago and the uni computers didn’t have autosave configured in word (they repeatedly told us this as well)
The worst part about it for me was that the only fault existed between the keyboard and the chair.
I used to keep all my uni assessments, course info and basically EVERYTHING on a USB attached to my key ring for easy access. Having a personal laptop wasn’t so much the rage back then.
One day while attempting to unload my paddle board off at the boat ramp, I forgot to put the handbrake on and got out of the car. It started rolling backwards. I slipped trying to stop it, fell under the front wheel and crushed/broke my hand. The car ended up in the river with the keys in the ignition. Not only did I lose a semesters worth of programs (ended up with 13/100 for programming), essays and reports, but I also lost my car. On a positive note, the paddle board survived.
I run a small business that uses a cluster of twelve Raspberry PIs to drive all the hardware within an interactive entertainment venue. I have a series of scripts that let them pull down the latest software builds, switch to a development version, and the like. I then use a utility called “distributed shell” to broadcast commands to the entire cluster that prompt them to all simultaneously run one of these scripts.
This set has a lot of upsides, but there’s a pretty clear risk here so I always test things out first on a machine that’s outside this cluster. Sometimes these scripts need to run in user-space, and sometimes they run at boot as a root user to change machine-wide configuration variables and the like. To help with this, I had one script that would repair file permissions and ownership on any files checked out of a repository by the wrong user. I’d made a few changes to the scripts that pulled down files to allow them to switch between versions more easily, and I’d checked the changes on my testing machine and it all worked.
Confident in the changes, I put the new script onto each machine in the cluster, then broadcast the new command to them all. Unfortunately I’d neglected one vital thing: to first set an environment variable holding the existing version in use. My fancy new script quite happily changed directory to “${EXISTING_VERSION_DIR}/” and proceeded to “sudo chown -R user:user *” to ensure the file ownership was correct. The Linux sysadmins in the root will already be grimacing, but for the benefit of everyone else: when you add a “/” to the end of a non-existent environment variable, you just get plain old “/”. And in Linux, that’s the root directory of the entire hard drive.
Not only had I managed to change the ownership of every single file on the entire computer to a user that wasn’t logged in, (and now couldn’t because the commands to login and change user weren’t accessible to it), I’d also managed to ensure every single machine in my entire cluster had just executed the same fatal mistake. And then of course, like any good engineer I wanted to know how I’d made such a mistake, so I retraced my steps carefully, and wiped out my testing machine too…
The only silver linings to this horrible tale are that I *did* have a recent image saved, so restoring all thirteen machines was at least possible. I’ve also learnt my lesson and there are now a lot more checks and balances to prevent anyone doing this again!
it was probably about 8-10 years ago, my housemate and I had amassed about a terrabyte of media on a NAS, being somewhat poor we had an old Ikea cupboard we had the ADSL Router in and the NAS along with a few other things and had taken the doors off for airflow, it was effective but well not the best solution… one day my father was at the house fixing a number for us while we were at work and i get home to a note from him with everthing he fixed and this roaring noise coming from the hall like a thousand jet engines… suffice to say he had re attached the doors to the cabinet and being a 35 degree day with no aircon on all day pretty much everything was dead… we had no internet and no TV shows, movies, photos lost the lot unless it was on our PC at the time untill that moment i had never really thought of the need to have a back up for the NAS now i always run a redundant raid array in a well ventilated space…
I run a small business and use a laptop back and forth from work and my home office. All my files were automatically backed up onto a NAS as soon as I went home and also backup into an external HDD when I go into the office.
When my laptop’s HDD failed I tried to recover the files from the NAS and during the recovery of files the NAS drive decided to fail also! Though it was frustrating, I wasn’t worried since there was another backup that was on the HDD at the office. The next morning, I went into work, ready to recover the lost files, and to my luck it also failed.
From all the failed drives, I managed to lose all my work files and also 10 years worth of photos and archive. That incident is now referred to as the CRASH of 07.
I forget the table names, but one of my most annoying data “loss” moments began with the word “UPDATE” in an SQL front-end connected to our client database. Something didn’t cross reference properly, and I overwrote a lot of fields.
Didn’t lose any pertinent client information but it took me about two weeks to reconstruct everything from an older backup.
I had placed a reputable ‘waterproof’ case on my new iPhone 6, I had done all the tests required and was satisfied that it was correctly sealed. So I took the phone into the pool to take photos of my children underwater. Within a minute i realised that something was dreadfully wrong and that water had indeed gotten into the case. I raced out of the pool with the kiddies in tow and dried to dry it out. Not only did I loose everything up until the last backup but i lost my new phone.
Was running raid 0 with HDDs as my main OS and storage for all my data..had no backup copies. HDD failed within 6months, lost everything 🙁 . Since then I bought SSDs in set in raid 0 for OS, have a separate slow spinning HDD for data with an external HDD as backup. ALWAYS BACKUP you stuff is what i learnt.
I had my iPhoto library stored on an external drive and backed up to AWS using Arq software. The external hard drive failed so I had to restore my iPhoto library from the backup. Unfortunately, 2 years of photos weren’t in the backup, and those 2 years included the first 2 years after our first son was born. All the baby photos gone.
As I racked my brains thinking how data could be recovered from a failed hard drive I remembered that I’d been exporting the baby photos to CD to send to my in-laws. Lucky that time, because I was able to restore from that “off-site backup”.
I was downloading files from my university server overnight on my laptop as I had done many nights before. When I woke up next morning the laptop had overheated, destroying the HDD which contained all my personal files and university assignments. Luckily I had my personal files backed up to an external HDD. Unluckily for me however I tripped over the power cord for that drive a week later. This rendered it unreadable and unrecoverable. The result was one failed assignment, the loss of every photo and document before 2008 and a hard lesson in the benefits of ventilation and cable management.
You never know the importance of backups until you suffer catastrophic data failure.
Not catastrophic per-se, and not exactly data loss either because I knew exactly where it went. It had been overwritten, and ‘it’ was my parents’ wedding photos taken with the first digital point and shoot we owned. The culprit? My younger brother and MS Paint. It turns out he didn’t like our new step-dad very much, and being 7 years old and pretty good with computers he decided to express his disdain in a creative way.
This is the only image that remains from that day, titled “THE MARY OF DEATH.jpg”. http://i.imgur.com/lN9pqIC.jpg
I saved a draft email in Gmail and was editing it with all my work for maybe a decade. Oneday I accessed it in a hurry on the phone and without thinking I pressed discard and it got permanently deleted. I moved heaven and earth to try get it back but no luck. I lost it all and I actually cried. Sounds stupid but I was devo! Years of work just gone in a heartbeat! Now I make sure I save documents in a secure location.
I asked my son to pull out a redundant hard drive in my PC so that I could drill a hole in it and dispose of it.Only problem was he pulled out the HDD storing all my precious data, images and vids which I proceeded to destroy with my hammer drill……maybe I should have checked before drilling.My fault not his…ouch!!
So my newly wedding wife and I decided to sit down and watch a movie on the TV, so i copied the movie to the USB so i could play it on the TV. The USB with the only copy of her special wedding video gift from her overseas friends. The movie didn’t read when it was plugged into the TV, i went back and plugged it to the computer and decided to ‘scan and fix’ didnt know it would wipe everything.. because i did this the night before and it worked fine….
in the end the movies i dragged over also weren’t copied it was cut… so no movie and no wedding video…….
hopefully she can get another copy from her friends, if not well hopefully i win the sportwatch to know it’s time to run or get beat down…
I used to draw a web comic on my iPad assuming it was saving all of my assets in the cloud. When I had to reinstall the app I found out this was a manual process and I’d lost all non-published work.
Back in the 00s a work colleague’s mother was using a surplussed DELL office machine running NT4 with RAID-1. They’d had a family member install a larger drive and migrate the contents, and thought all was good.
. . . . then the crash! They thought that because the machine was originally mirroring the drives, that a restore would be easy. What they didn’t realise was that the family friend didn’t understand mirrored drives (either), and when then couldn’t get the a 500MB and the new 2GB drives mirrored, they simply cloned the original system to the new drive, and left one of the 500MB drives in the machine disconnected.
Fortunately I was able to recover the crashed NTFS partition, and all of their data – the only casualties on the 2GB drive were system files that I was able to recover from the disconnected drive.
Not my preferred backup/recovery scenario, but they did get all their data back!
We had the videos of our oldest son as a baby and the days he was learning to walk on an external hard drive. The files became corrupt and we’ve lost the ability to view them. On top of that my wife will occasionally see the folder and remind me that it’s my fault and that I should be able to fix it. Salt in the wounds!
With the impending due date I was desperately texting my godfather who had forgotten to help me with my “mentor” business studies assignment. In that moment, my phone froze, and the message edited to perfection remain unsent. Regrettably, I tapped the screen angrily about 40 times pleading for a response and then the screen went black. All my photos, messages, notes gone and my incomplete assignment pretty much doomed to failure. Patience is a virtue which I doubtfully will ever attain.
I recently purchased a Seagate portable hard drive and after 3 months… BOOM… Nothing. From work files, family photos, movies and more, everything disappeared! I had an important file i needed to submit to work that was completely gone. Suffice to say I was not impressed. Then to top it all off, after calling Seagate, they were going to charge me to try and recover my data! Bull$#!? I say! Thankfully the store I had purchased it from were more than accommodating in recommending me another product. You never realize how much you miss it once its all gone 😛
Look, admittedly this was a very long time ago (a decade or so now!), but this is only because I’ve learned my lesson and spent (at the time) big money on a RAID 5 Thecus NAS that is backed up to an ESATA attached external drive EVERY NIGHT and reports checked daily for successful backup.
I’d managed to ignore my business partner and keep our main MYOB Premier file (among my personal photos etc, documents etc), on my unprotected single hard disk desktop. One day when firing up the computer, all I got was the lovely click of death which is what my face would have looked like at the time. The business had been running 9 years……ALL….DIGITAL….ACCOUNTING…..GONE.
I spent almost 6 months working an extra hour or two unpaid every day re-constructing the data for at least the last 5-7 years and hoping in the mean time our tax returns were done correctly as there was no hope the ATO or anyone else who needed our financials could ever get anything out of us accurately around that time. I worried for 7 years, because I had no confidence the accounts were 100% accurate if ever audited, and that’s how long we were supposed to keep records. It would have cost us tens of thousands of dollars all because I was a cocky idiot.
Never again.
My biggest data loss occurred when I asked a ‘friend’ for some source code to a problem I was working on. He told me not to compile and run the program as it would not work and would probably mess something up. I thought what was the worst that could happen made it compile and run while I went for a run. Little to my knowledge he added a small little bit of code to the program that caused it to perform a secure erase on D drive, so when I got back a few hours later to do some testing I realised that drive had been wiped.
No big loss I thought I had just two weeks prior down a complete backup of all my important files to megaupload, unfortunately for me when I went to grab all my files I was greeted by the lovely FBI logo. They had just seized the megaupload domain and all my files were gone.
Needless to say my ‘friend’ felt horrible and spent a few months trying to make up for his little prank and I learnt a few valuable lessons that day, to always check other peoples code before running it and ALWAYS backup your data to more than 1 location. I still hold a very small hope that one day I may be able to get some of my data back if megaupload ever pop back up if my data wasn’t on the servers that were wiped.
When you’ve been a computer guy for pretty much your whole life (30 out of 34 years) our bound to have a few, my most memorable ones going backwards in time.
Most recently, I went into the home office one morning and the PC had frozen, rebooted and it wouldn’t boot up, but made a clicking noise. Lost a lot of un-committed changes, thousands of photos (including lots of my first kids first few weeks), and had to setup everything all over again. I still have that drive, i cant bare to throw it out.
Or, When i started at a job i was told that a machine that was used to pay everyone (special NAB software that dialed into NAB) was left on every night so it could be backed up.
It came to a point it needed to be rebuilt, i moved all the data i wanted to keep to c:\Backup in preparation to move it off to the server (and it would have been easier than putting data off the tape backup afterwards) , after i finished formatted it rebuilt, went looking for the backup folder on the server and it wasn’t there, no problem, grabbed the backup tape from the previous night and its not on there, the machine had never been backed up and no one got paid until the following week.
Or, there was when i was 15 or so, i was screwing a hard drive into the case after having it resting on top of the opened box for months, i thought the screws were the right ones, turns out they were a bit too long and crunch, cracked the controller board, lost a few gig of data that day.
Being the Boss I thought I’d sleep in one morning and go to work late when I get a message from the guys in the office; “Are you deleting client files in dropbox?”.
Alarm bells ringing in my head I reply with “No! Why do you ask?”. Turns out our new recruit whilst installing dropbox on her computer clicked a few prompts to over-ride existing data. Client files quickly dissapearing with every moment. New staff member in tears…. What a day to remember.
I needed to reimage my laptop as it was facing some issues with slowness and file errors, but I forgot to allow my photos/files to finish uploading to the cloud, and I didn’t check if they all uploaded correctly. When I went to download my files back onto my computer, the cloud storage had many empty folders without the actual files inside 🙁
I work in maintenance taking care of a semi automated plant. Beginning of this year we were carrying out our routine shutdown work, anyway we had finished and decided to isolate the power to to the system since there wouldn’t be anybody working there for another 2 weeks.
The boss wanted to know whether the PLC was powered off the main contactor or a seperate switch so I proceeded to turn off the main contactor what could go wrong right it’s nothing unusual we do it regularly when we need to carry out work. With the power off I checked the PLC and sure enough it was off, no problem power it up and instead just isolate the 2 contactors that power everything else but not the PLC. With the power back on all I had to do was initialise the system and check everything had started back up before turning the power off again simple right, wrong everything powered up but that’s it! The lights were on but nobody was home.
There was nothing to intialise the system was blank nothing worked I new straight away what had happened and checked the PLC. What I feared had happened a little red light flashing indicating the backup battery failed. When I shut the power off even though it was only a minute with out the battery I had just wiped the PLC clean! On the bright side at least I didn’t blow the dam thing up.
To make matters worse it was Christmas and there was nobody available so we had to wait for the first day back to get someone in to upload the program and restart and check everything.
lol we now have a procedure to check PLC battery backup monthly and definitely before we even think about powering off main contactor!
I did nothing wrong I just upgraded from Windows 8 to 10 and my hard drive crashed and then lost my job ?
I did nothing wrong I just upgraded from Windows 8 to 10 and my hard drive crashed and then lost my job ?
While explaining to my (at the time) girlfriends friend about backing up data I went to give her a spare external hdd. When I went to format it I realised I accidentally formatted my backup drive which contained every photo we had of our relationship up until then.
Bonus points for also showing her how to easily backup her phone via Bluetooth (at the time this wasn’t easy to do) and then finding out that it automatically backed her phone up whenever she came around after my partner went to look for some photos on my computer and found a folder with all her friends photos including a few which were not very appropriate for me to have.
I bought a new all in one Asus PC,cost me $600.It kept crashing right from the start,I lost a lot of stuff.Took it to be repaired,they told me it had never been formatted correctly,in other words,I bought a dud and wasted $600.I now have a new all in one HP and it goes like a dream..TOUCH WOOD!
Had a Apple Macbook Pro from new in high school which was suppose to be a useful tool. However through out the cause of owning my laptop i had over 60 hard drive wipes due to both data loss and system failure, now wether it was due to the schools custom version of mac osx or the hardware the problem keep happening for the full 3 remaining years in high school. After even changing the Logic board and ram and something like 10 hard drives the same problem of not been able to write or read to the hard drive would occur then leading to a complete melt down. So when i finished school after the hsc back in 2014 like most other now school free students i was enjoying my nothing time and as i was reading gizmodo.com.au my macbook pro black out on me for the final time. At this point i wasn’t surprised after more than 3 years of hell, so i proceeds to do the usual reseting the logic board and computer however nothing was happening… No signs of life, no charging. As an act of desperation i contacted apple and to my shear luck with no question apple was very compliant and replaced my laptop for the 3 time with a 2012 model which did have the same defects. As a result i managed to loose a good portion of marks in my HSC year for my IT subject along with other subjects over the precious years. Probably the worst part was the schools IT which i will not name for obvious reasons would accuse me of causing this issue, so to prove these incompetent humans wrong i told them to use full force parental controls to show them i wasting causing the issue, and it happened again and again proving i wasn’t stupid enough to be causing the issue. Not Happy !!.
The twins are now 10 and Madi is 12, so when I speak of the loss of family photos I am writing of more than moving house and missing that one doorframe where kid’s heights were measured. I’m talking of a monumental loss, Madi was 4 when she was a flower girl and the memory of the day fades with time. Of course the bride has photos but it’s as if the day was about her. Madi was the star of our photos. The twins, well it was before they became rude and smelly. It was a time that we still liked our kids and understood that it is worth it. Losing the drives in our NAS was harsh. The Western Digital, My Book World II (what a concept, a dual backup, what could go wrong?) when the unit died and both drives were corrupted we lost so much.
There were no birth photos, I mean YUK. But every family moment for 8 years gone in a flash, almost literally.
Our friends, like most parents, look back at those moments fondly, prompting the warm feelings with digital photos as a conversation piece. For us, it is different, we look at these young people and try to remember. Already devastated that EBAY will not let us sell one, and try to remember back to those birthdays, anniversaries, lunches in the park and trumpet recitals.
Yes, the loss of those drives has been horrific. It’s not just the memories you lose that make it tough, because you also feel guilt. You knew that products like Acronis existed and just never got around to it. Now you have robbed the kids you love of those photos. (Yes I do really love them).
Years ago, I had everything on a single hard drive – a Seagate, I think it was. I did backups occasionally – but not very often, once or twice a year, if that. Of course when the disk was 3 or 4 years old it crashed one day, as I discovered when on turning on the computer I was rewarded with a nasty grating sound like something heavy being dragged across the street.
I knew straight away what it was, and took it to a recovery centre. They told me that the head had crashed and it had almost certainly scratched the drive platter making it very unlikely that any data could be recovered.
Well, I was desperate. Everything I had was on that drive, my backups were ancient, and I was prepared to pay whatever it cost to get my data back.
After about 3 weeks of waiting nervously, they said they had tried and failed. I asked them to try again, and surprisingly they agreed. Another couple of weeks passed, and eventually they came back with the same answer – nothing. But for some reason, I was convinced that the data was recoverable – maybe I just didn’t want to accept that fact that it was all gone forever. So, guess what? Yup, you guessed correctly, I asked them to try again, a 3rd time! I was expecting them to refuse, tell me to pay up, and go away. But to my surprise they agreed again and put a different person on the job who told me that he thought he might be able to recover some very small fragments of data, and asked if I would be happy with that. Of course, I said I would – hoping he was being pessimistic and would actually recover much more – and after another 2 or 3 weeks, to my utter amazement, he called me and told me that despite the drive making very horrible noises as he put it through his recovery software, that he had managed to recover most of my data! He had opened up the drive, patched up the broken head as best he could, and ‘persuaded’ it to keep going just long enough to get the data off before it stopped working completely.
As it turned out, I only lost a few files that weren’t particularly important; he had recovered well over 95% of the data when everyone else had given up trying. I learned a huge lesson from that and now keep my data on at least 5 different drives (yeah, I know) , and do key data backups automatically every day, and further backups weekly. Phew!
I was working on my school’s year book in our library. I had just commented to someone that the thing they use to make the books beep if you try to take them was just a giant electromagnet. You can probably see where this is going. Moments later, I had to move my laptop out of my way, so I placed it to the side. When I picked it up again, there was a strange force. Then a weird scratching noise. Then a blue screen of death. The hard drive head had been pulled down onto the platter and took out all my data, including the only copy of the year book design and layout.
I tried to “Scan and Fix” one of my USB’s and all my data became unusable 🙁
Now I know to always click “Continue without scanning”.
I had recently loss all movies and Rv shows due to an old faulty back up drive. So I decided that I needed to up date my photos just incase this happened as the drives were the same age and brand. It took a few days to get it all done. Wedding photos, baby photos of my children, pictures of my beautiful grandma (rip) and my long lost puppies (rip). This new drive held all the memories of life, it was who I was. I decided to take the drive to my mums house to share some memories as I discovered some great ones. While walking there someone stole my bag with the drive in it. I didn’t think too much of it, more concerned with my purse and id’s lost until I got home and realised I had copied and deleted all the files after computing on to the new drive. Devastated to say the least!
It was my first day on the job. It hadn’t even passed 10am. It was my first job in the industry I had longed to join. I was nervous. I was keen to impress. My two immediate superiors stood by me discussing what needed to be done that day, which began with me rebuilding a PC.
I grabbed the case, moved it to a suitable position but unbeknownst to me the HDD was poised near the edge of the desk.
I promptly jabbed the drive with the edge of the case sending it careening at terminal velocity towards the hard floor. It landed on one of its corners. It didn’t bounce. It mostly just came to a sudden halt and slapped down onto one of its broad sides with a sickening thud; like seeing someone knock their head painfully into a solid wall.
I felt a little faint. I felt a little nausea.
HDD dead. Contents all but destroyed.
Job survived…thankfully.
I was undertaking my honours year at university and living in a share house that needed so much maintenance it should have been demolished years before. I was at the point in my honours year where I was finalising my thesis but I stupidly thought that just saving it on my laptop was enough. One day, a massive storm hit. I was at my parent’s place at the time for dinner and received a frantic call from my housemate that the roof above my bedroom has collapsed. When I came home I found my bedroom was a soggy mess. My laptop, which was on my bed at the time, was completely waterlogged and dead. I seriously have never cried so much in my life. Luckily, my supervisor had a recent hardcopy draft of the paper but it took a solid week to retype the whole thing.
I learned my lesson the hard way and I have invested in good back up software (and a few USBs) for all my work since then.
When I was like 15 I accidentally deleted ALL of my music, which was a massive deal at the time because I’d built it over the last 5 years out of ripped CD’s, Limewire downloads, trades with friends on USBs etc. Thousands of 256kbp/s MP3 files gone. And I didn’t notice I’d done it, so by the time I did notice most of the data was unrecoverable, leaving me without precious album metadata that had been meticulously curated, tracks missing from albums, corrupt MP3 files and all of the OCD horror that came with it.
Seems weird that it was ever a problem considering the world of Spotify & iTunes we live in now.
About 10 years ago, I owned a Linux based laptop, or netbook as it was called. A tiny little thing that I used in a deadend job to document a novel I was working on. I didn’t have the most amount of money, but worked on this novel idea during lunch breaks and any free chance I got. After a year of editing and working on it, a co-worker wanted to check out some photos on a USB stick he had. So he plugged it into my netbook and fooled around for a while.
By the time my next opportunity came around, I opened my netbook and found it completely shut down. So I powered it on, to find that everything on the harddrive was completely corrupted. It took me days to recover some of the novel, and I’m talking about 20 pages out of hundreds as I had chapters saved as different files.
My co-worker later confessed the USB stick he was used was found outside work and he wanted to check it out. But was afraid to plug it into his computer but since I used Linux, he didn’t think.
Now I make sure to back up my files on various USB drives, sd cards and via the cloud.
Recently lost a ZFS striped array full of personal data because of a faulty drive. Unfortunately it’s unrecoverable. 🙁
My desktop tower had been running hot for quite a while, but I didn’t have the money or know-how to fix it. So my dad offered to come over and have a look at it. This is the man who is famous in our family for “fixing” my auntie’s crawling doll so it crawled backwards (it was only ever meant to crawl forwards)…so I should have had my reservations, but I was desperate. He spent two hours pulling the tower apart, dusted it all out, put it back together, plugged it in, hit the power button and BANG! It literally blew up. There were sparks :/ I lost many of my baby’s photos that day (all that I was yet to back up to CD…this was before the cloud days!), and I was more than a little devastated. Needless to say I’m now a lot wiser about backing up important photos, videos and documents…and I’ve invested time into teaching myself how to carry out basic computer repairs.
I have always been someone who backs all their data up onto an external drive. However I decided I wanted all my important uni assignments and photos from travel on one drive too for an extra level of back up. As I plugged my external drive into my computer our cat jumped from a high bookshelf in the office to the desk and spilt my entire cup of tea onto the external drive and completely destroyed it. The computer guy couldn’t recover anything and I lost all my photos from travel, all my uni assignments and work a week before finals. Life lesson- don’t get a damn cat.
I manually typed (yep, typed) 100 odd pieces of bagpipe music into a primitive score writer a few years ago – it took about an hour for each piece. I backed these onto an external hard drive as cloud based storage was out of the question, thanks to the joys of rural internet.
A friend agreed to print the music for me – but accidentally wiped the drive, on the same day my computer hard drive packed it in.
You will never know the pain.
The organisation I worked for had a lot of elderly volunteers acting as advisers and phone support to elderly users of our free software. A myth had built up among these volunteers that if you deleted cookies and temp files it would magically speed up a slow computer.
One of the volunteers had been a system admin back when hard drives were the size of refrigerators and he had knowledge of DOS. He decided to create a little batch file that would delete all the temp files on the drive and he distributed it to all the other volunteers so they could help users who couldn’t navigate the file system very well.
The only problem was he made a small typo in his batch file, instead of del /s *.tmp he made it del /s *.* which successfully deleted every file on the computer that wasn’t currently in use.
We discovered this when I got a call from one of the volunteers to tell me her computer crashed and wouldn’t restart.
The batch file had been distributed to thousands of people by the time we managed to find out what had been done, who had created this “fix” and asked him to stop creating batch files.
Personal – Spent 5 years as an expat in Cambodia and Vietnam. Halfway through at the end of my time in Cambodia had my laptop stolen. Lost 2.5 years worth of photos from non-stop travel, adventure and amazing experiences including photos from the birth and early months of my first child. Devastating. I now have multiple layers of backups both onsite and offsite. The only photos remaining from the period are the handful posted to Facebook.
Business – Company server hosted by insert major provider name here . Server failed. No problem, go to the daily backup.. Not there… Turns out the daily backup server had also failed and had been failing for months with no-one noticing. Had to roll back to the latest monthly backup. Lost over two weeks of customer transaction data that had to be reconstructed from other sources. Months later we would have a customer enquiry and have no record of their original transaction and have to piece it together based on whatever information they could provide.
It was 1991, I had no idea about computers but looked like the kind of person who did.
My first date with this girl was going well, so well we went back to her place. She wanted to show me an assignment she had just completed. Her first assignment, first year of her law degree. She was very proud of her work. It was due the next day.
I read the assignment while she went upstairs to “slip into something more comfortable”. She asked me to shut down the computer when I was done reading.
I knew nothing about Winchester hard drives or about “parking” the hard drive to move the heads away from the surface before powering down to stop them colliding with the disk platter and destroying data.
About 10 minutes later when my date came downstairs and tried to fire up the computer to show me a draft of her next assignment I learned about parking hard drives.
The date progressed no further. She never spoke to me again.
A couple time a year I get black out and drunk and lose all of my internal / personal memory data for the previous 12 hours. Safe to say this cause’s a fair amount of anxiety on my part.
I am drilled at work constantly about the importance of backing up regularly.
So I backed up my home pc in December 2013… had a baby in January 2014… lost both my hard drives in November 2015, all those moments that you cannot recreate gone, because of one lazy mistake!
I was part of a team of 6 people responsible for writing an 800,000-word encyclopedia. My expertise is in researching, writing, and editing — NOT in information technology or computers.
Anyway, the team pooled our work on to a “shared drive”. I guess I never fully appreciated the concept of *shared* drive.
One day, I uploaded all my own work to the shared drive. Months of work. But, in doing so, I accidentally deleted everyone else’s work that was saved on the shared drive. That work included the writings of 3 professors and 2 other researchers.
As I saw the contents of the shared drive being replaced with only my own files and folders, I did wonder for a minute if I was doing the right thing; but I secured myself in thinking, “Well, the IT team will have a backup anyway”. So, I proceeded.
The outcome? I had overwritten (ie effectively deleted and lost forever) months of hard work from all my colleagues.
Due to some exquisite accidental timing, the only files that were backed-up were my own. Every other team member’s work had been lost. Permanently.
I wasn’t very popular from that moment on.
At work, I had set up what I thought to be a test NAS system for our companies backups. One day I accidently deleted a shared drive. Unconcerned, I proceeded through the week in blissful ignorance until I got a call to one of the partner’s office. I arrived to be met with a huge earful. Apparently not everyone was on the same page and had moved files across only to be lost on the test NAS. It was something like 5 years worth of consulting data and I still to this day have my fingers crossed that it is never needed..
When I was younger, my dad let me borrow his laptop – the first in the family, a prized possession. I was watching a movie with a friend on it when a bee came and landed on the keyboard. Thinking fast I grabbed a cup and upturned it on the keyboard to catch the bee. I caught the bee, but it along with the computer drowned in the chocolate milkshake that was still filling half of the cup! I felt so incredibly stupid! That was the end of me or my dad getting anything off that laptop!!
I work for a footwear wholesaler as the sole footwear designer. I had designed and drawn 6 months worth of artwork (I’m talking hundreds of designs) . My server crashed and I lost the whole lot. The worst part was customers had wanted to order my designs and I had to re draw them exactly from memory to send to our factories to sample.. It was the WORST!!!
I had my Mac for about 5 years, as solid as a flinstones newspaper it never let me down. One evening I was watching game of thrones (purchased legally) on my television through a hdmi cable plugged into old faithful. The episode had reached its climax and a beloved character was unexpectedly killed. My housemate and I screamed suddenly, surprising my Labrador at the foot of the couch. Max ran out of the room to flee from our screams of horror, on the way slipping his head through a noose the extra hdmi cable had created and pulled my laptop to the ground in pieces. I lost 5 years of photos, and some important work docs, but worst of all missed the last 10 minutes of ‘the red wedding’.
I was one week away from my university exams, and had just finished typing up notes for all four of my law subjects, which I needed during the exam as they were all open book. That night a prompt on my computer appeared requesting to update the system. I accepted and left my computer to install the new updates. However, while I was gone, the power in half the house went off (I was in the other half so I didn’t notice) and my laptop stopped charging, and turned off halfway through updating. When I later turned it back on, the disrupted update had caused all my files to be erased! Worst week of my life. Needless to say I bought a hard drive and now use it religiously.
At work we use Dropbox as storage for all our files. One day we arrived to work ready to work on our files only to find them all missing. One of our colleagues sheepishly informed us that his wife had deleted them all the night before to clear space on his home computer’s hard drive.
Hello, it look like a tale but its my personal story.
I never thought my all data will gone like this.
I save all my data in my PC HDD with taking any backup, one I didn’t plugout of my PC and earthing wire was not good in that house, and plus was in holder, that day heavy raining and I was confident nothing is going to be, a thunderstorm destroy my all data of my HDD, everything vanish all of my PC hardware was in warranty so all are repaired but I lose my data, only drop box I got back because that was in cloud, that day I understand how much important backup is.
Picture it: the couch, two thousand fifteen. Game of Thrones was playing on the telly, and I was on my trusty laptop revising the finest thesis ever written. I glanced through the paragraphs — not bad. Thesis could do with a better introduction though. But wait! Someone was about to get murdered! My thesis can wait — please let it be another Lannister. Unfortunately it wasn’t, so I glanced back at my laptop… just in time to see the screen distort and blank out.
An error message appeared, but no time to read it — heads were getting lopped off. Action and more action later, it was time for another five-second look at my never-ending thesis. Three seconds in, the screen glitched and and blanked out again. I wasn’t going to let a misbehaving laptop ruin my pleasure in the adventures of Tyrion and Co., so I skipped the error messages a couple more times.
Like Robb, I ignored the signs and was utterly blindsided when it all went to hell. By the end of the episode, my laptop refused to boot into the OS and eventually only displayed a white screen comparable to the landscape Beyond the Wall.
Long story short, my SSD died the same night a major character died on screen. But that wasn’t the worst part. The real horror story was my laptop (which I use every day) has not been reformatted or backed up since the day I got it — over 5 years ago.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t ignore error messages; they are there for a reason. Oh and backup your data. Backup so you don’t end up like me, whose files are still more scattered than the Starks of Winterfell.
Need a new watch for work is it water proof.
Once I was working on a relatively large and important Adobe Photopshop file and attempted to unknowingly save it on a server drive that wasn’t large enough to hold my file. This currupted the file and automatically removed itself from the drive altogether. This would of been a total catastrophe if the servers did not get backed up on a nightly bases. Thankfully I was able to recover the lost file to its last night state and was able to submit the file on time. Although I lost some data it was not a total nightmare due to nightly backups but I wish they were backed up more often in the future to avoid future mishaps.
When people say you should always back up your data, it’s true.
Thanks!
In 2004 my Grandfather died, and Dad was putting together the order of service sheets for his funeral. He was pretty much finished, and asked me to look over some of it before he left to take the file to the printers. For reasons I don’t remember, I helped him organise and move some files around. At the time, I had a terrible habit of getting annoyed at files sitting in the Recycle Bin, so I would usually do a shift-delete to bypass it. I grabbed a bunch of files and did a shift-delete.
I could feel a change in the air as soon as I did it. He knew, and I knew, exactly what was in the mix of those files. That critical document was gone, and he had minutes to get out the door to make it to the printers in time. I threw a few random clicks around the screen, knowing exactly what I’d done, and that there was pretty much nothing I could do to recover it. In the hour-long 30 seconds that followed, I wondered what living on the street might be like. After some very choice words, Dad picked up an early draft off the printer that he had used mocked up to check his layouts. It took him a long time to get that far, he told me, and there would be no choice but for them to make copies of the incomplete inkjet-sourced booklet.
It took a while to convince him I could type it back out quickly enough to save the situation. If I ever needed proof him bringing home a computer from work when I was only 4 years old was a good idea, this was it.
I honestly think pretty much the only thing that saved me from joining Pop in the crematorium were those quick typing skills, and that lucky early draft.
Once my brother deleted my Legend of Zelda save file, but the silver lining is I really enjoy being an only child now.
My dad used an SLR camera to take photos of my sister graduation. The day after my dad connected the memory card to the TV to look at photos. Somehow, an error occurred and the memory card cant be used unless it is formatted. Well, my sister now does not have any graduation photo which she will only happen once in her life. Always be careful with important data.
My story starts like any other, as I was a teenager on the brink of a breakthrough. Typing out one of my hundreds of assignments in an attempt to gain a respectable ATAR. When my strung out, emotionally weak, coffee frazzled brain somehow corrupted all of the documents on my computer, containing all of my Year 12 assignments and a life worth of photos I might add. Now this may seem bad but for the crazy student I was, this was catastrophic and resulted in a week of all nighters to replace all of the assignments I had lost. As well as a not very well placed breakdown showing the extent to which that data loss affected me in the present but the worry of how it would ultimately affect my future and worse…..my ATAR.
I spent weeks organising all the photos I had on SD cards, putting them into folders on the laptop, deleting the excess ones. All the kids from birth (about 6 years worth). I finally had them all nicely organised, thought I’d be clever and format the SD cards (not really sure why).
Of course, the inevitable happened and the hard disc drive died on my laptop. It was under warranty, so the laptop was ok, but of course the photos are not. I had them send me back the old hard drive in the hope that I could get someone to see if it could be salvaged, but everyone I’ve spoken to has said it needs to be a specialist who would charge a fortune and even then probably not be successful. Now it sits in the pantry, staring at me, taunting me, and I shake my head.
I am computer illiterate and I type with one finger. My son gave me an Ipad for my birthday some time back and he transferred all of my old photos over the years that I had taken of weddings, children and the family generally growing up from my old computer from the day of Window 1.
We were on holidays and as we were leaving the motel I put the Ipad on the roof of the car and forgot all about it. Never seen it again: have no copies of nearly any of the photos and there is nothing in this world that can replace them. Tis a very sad loss indeed.
During my Honours year at university (BPsychHons), we were told numerous horror stories of students losing their work because they hadn’t backed it up. I was so worried about this happening to me I emailed myself copies and put copies of everything on about 3 different USBs at the end of every day. Two days before my thesis was due my computer crashed before I had a chance to do this, and I lost all of the work I had done that day. Unfortunately, I am a leave-it-until-the-last-minute person, so I ended up losing an entire section of my thesis (and a piece of my soul) that I was unable to recover. Two days and I don’t want to admit how many cups of coffee later, I handed in my completed thesis on time (hey, 2 minutes before deadline is still on time). I did really well, but I still haven’t worked up the courage to re-read my caffeine-fueled ramblings…
The most valuable experience I can share with you is never let your computer join you at morning tea time. While I was enjoying a cup I slipped somehow and gave a full hot cuppa to my very ungrateful pc which in turn has refused any and all help to work of even turn one since… I t was a very expensive cup of tea….
I convinced my wife 8 years ago that we could store all our family pictures on digital media and not have to print them out. I wasn’t very tech savvy and thought all CD/DVD were as good as each other. We backed them up 6 years of the kids and family gathering/holidays and they all corrupted after 2 years. I keep telling her that memories are better than some old picture, she still is made about it and will not talk about the subject, I now back up to a double system as well as the cloud, for the sake of my marriage and life.
There has been heaps of times I lost data from not either backing up or my computer crashing. My worst two times was:
1/ I am studying website development and I was doing a rather long assignment on HTML and CSS coding and I was in the middle of my work, I didn’t save it half way through and my computer crashed. When I managed to fix it, not only did I loose that assignment but all my assignments for the course.
2/ I backed up ALL my photos from the age of 5-25 on a external hard drive thinking that it would be protected on there. I put the hard drive away, and only used it from time to time to put more photos on there and one day I forgot to safely eject it. The next time I used it, it had a clicking sound and didn’t work. I lost ALL my photos. All my memories. I was devastated. That was over 5 years ago. I still have the hard drive in attempts to fix it one day. Every 6 months or so I randomly plug it in hoping it will work, still no luck.
Years ago when I was studying Nursing I had rather a large meltdown. I had typed my whole essay (due in the next day) and somehow it disappeared off the screen. I was already a mature aged student, 40 at the time and did not have much of a clue about computers (slightly better now) and you can imagine the state I was in. My daughter said “Mum you couldn’t have lost it” what did you do? I don’t know I replied running around the room hysterical. I never found it and have no idea what I did with it. The moral of this story is save your data as you go along, and I am now paranoid about doing it. I did get a reprieve for a few days only, so I was very busy over those few days getting things together with very few notes but I did it and also passed.
To this day I still don’t know what happened or what I did, or if my computer was just being a turd before it took its last breath and died, but I lost ALL our wedding photo’s along with a plethora of other memories, documents, music and filmed footage. All on the trusty hard drive, waiting for me to pull my finger out and back everything up on disc. He who snoozes, clearly loses…..I should not have kept delaying buring everything to disc. You live and you learn.
My computer was running slow, so I wasn’t sure what the problem was so i was trying to reinstall the OS. My computer has a SSD and Two Hard drives, one hard drive contains all my photos and videos, while the other contains all the games i have. Because they were both separate drives, i did not think of backing any of them up. When i ran the Windows Disc, it was late at night, i was pretty tired. I clicked the wrong drive to partition, The warning didn’t register with me probably due to the lack of sleep. I wasn’t sure why but i ended up formatting all the drives and didn’t notice it till the whole operation system install was finish. I was checking the system rating, when i saw that my two full drives were not red anymore (the storage space) but blue. It was then that i realized, all my photos, videos and games were gone. It was from then i always made a backup when i did anything that could erase anything..
My data loss story relates to sheer stupidity. I had been backing up a small office system using an incremental system for about 10 years. As the server hard drive began to crash, I had incrementally transferred corrupted data across for some time until bang! Our server crashed. Thinking I was so smart and had diligently backed up for all those years, I soon found that the server drive that crashed had slowly been infecting the 3 incremental backs ups over a period of time. I’m talking client details and project information spanning 10 years! I no longer work at this particular company. Oh god!
Babysitting my God-son for a weekend and deciding to use the laptop to set him up for some of his favourite movie entertainment. Bad idea. In the space of me quickly going to grab some refreshments he got his hands onto a flash stick usb of mine, that contained all the shots I’d captured of a friends farewell party. Inserted it into the laptop and yep you guessed it Deleted that one folder on it.
Not so much a loss but I got a new iphone to take photos on while on holiday in thailand and their powerpoints triggered a hardware issue in my phone I was unaware off, my phone could not be plugged into any outlet and I had 1 day to try to send as many photos as I possibly could to my facebook before my battery ran out and my phone would be unable to be charged again and would be replaced by apple.
my partner wanted to save her photos from her phone and unplugged my portable hard drive from xbox on plugged it into her laptop and formatted the hard drive and wiped out 2tb of game i had downloaded, it took me weeks to to re download them.
Early 90s travelled to North Korea to work for 4 months, made the mistake of taking my new Acer laptop with me. Getting it into the country was ok, getting it out after all the work was a problem, firstly confiscated at customs on departure they went through all files seeing what I had written. That wasn’t the worse, they ran it through their antiquated X-ray scanning machine and fried the hard drive, you know they type of X-ray machines so base they give you a tan standing alongside, didn’t think to backup prior of course, worse mistake I made, did have paper hard copy of most if the work reports so wasn’t all lost
On the last day of our 6 week holiday I tried to delete a photo from my Samsung phone but instead deleted the whole album.
OK. So a few years ago I had to do an update/restart on my school computer (somehow this never went well for me no matter what I tried). So before school I opened it up and got it started knowing I would have to wait at least 1/2 an hour before it was done. Meanwhile, I’m trying to eat breakfast and get ready for school, and watch the news (multitasking will be my downfall), and thus I end up with a bowl of cereal clutched in one hand, the other hand on the laptop holding it steady (by then it was nearly done), and my eyes on the TV screen. You can probably see where this is going…Not concentrating on my cereal, unbeknownst to me it begins to tilt forward a little bit. Then a little bit more. And more. Suddenly, I had a lap splattered with cornflakes, and a sea of cold milk infusing my keyboard.
Long story short I poured my breakfast into my laptop in the middle of an update.
The result: embarrassment as I explained the situation to IT support + a vow never again to eat the cereal which had wronged me (or at least eat it far away from any computer) + the discovery that I had lost a bunch of school assignment related files, and the fact that my laptop wouldn’t work for at least a day regardless of charge. Not to mention the resulting glitches in the keyboard from then onward.
Files I had been editing/perfecting were gone, and thus was my trust was lost in both cereal and school computers.
Baam!! Years ago I got a promoted to Manager got a work phone
..wooohooo the good old Nokia…the one where snake was.your best friend!! I was at a shopping centre doing the daily banking and fsilly me accepted this bluetooth sharing…obviously with some naughty random stray….my phone was calling all these 1300 numbers all hours of the morning..
I lost absolutely everything! There was nothing left on my phone but a calculator all the other files gone….deleted…a.trogan had formatted it all…I was devasted 3000 pics gone…just gone
I was spending time with my two baby nephews (one 3, the other 2). I was doing some work on my laptop when out of nowhere the 2 year old starts pulling down on the laptop’s screen. Now I must say I was quite amazed by the “flexibility” of the display, but my awe was quickly interuppted by dread when I heard a loud snap. The screen fell to the floor, and my 3 year old nephew couldn’t help but giggle. (But neither could I – it was a little funny!)
I wasn’t too fussed by the incident – all the main internal components (ah-hem, HDD) would be alright, right? They were, until of course the 2 year old comes running up to see what all the commotion was about before tripping and spewing up food all over the keyboard resting on my lap.
You get the picture!
My wife and I eloped to NZ earlier this year. She was in charge of taking the photos and I was in charge of storing them. I was well organised and took along my laptop and an external hard drive so I could copy the photos to both. She initially wanted to be in charge of recording our ceremony but since I proved myself reliable in the first few days, she said I could set up the camera to record it. Popped it on the tripod and hit record right before the ceremony. Well, after the ceremony, we checked out the footage. I had forgotten to delete all previous videos (it was a borrowed camera and it didn’t occur to me to check!!!) so all we have is around 10 seconds of us standing around waiting for the ceremony to begin then it cuts out…… thankfully, we got some beautiful photos but I don’t think I’ll ever live this one down!!!
I was never big on back up and held all my data on a Macbook Air, this was up until 12 months ago when it was stolen in a break and enter! I lost songs, photos and documents and worst of all the thief was able to continue to access my iTunes account and continue to download songs on my behalf.
I wouldn’t have minded if it was good music but alas it wasn’t. I learned some big lessons including password protection, tracking apps and most importantly backing up information!
I buyed an USB Hub off Ebay for my External HDD, Guess what it end up being very doggy item from china ? I didn’t know it was from china, the ad said it was coming from Sydney, anyway it damaged one of my External HDDS, But I got my money back for the doggy item but lost all my personal files like photos, videos and documents, which i still do not have up to today I had to get a replacement of my external hdd from the store i buyed it from.
I’ve suffered data loss twice but the very worst time was when we were burgled 3 years ago and they stole our laptop that had all of our photo’s of our babies on it and even the video of two of their caesarians, to say I was devastated is an understatement. I’ll never ever feel that vulnerable again, I DOUBLE save all of my data now on two external hard drives to be positive the memories will never be lost again.
Thankfully I had a few cd’s with some photo’s on them which means not all memories were lost but that feeling of complete devastation is indescribable.
My computer carked it with a total loss of hard drive. I actually cried. I’d been very stupid and hadn’t done a backup for ages (we get SO complacent) and had to start all over. Acronis would have been my saviour.
I had three hard drives crash within the space of about 18 months back in the early 2000s. I was so upset I became catatonic when the last one happened. Much more careful with backups now – I’d burned a lot of things to CDs, which was something. More upsetting than anything was having to replace so many computers in such a short space of time! $$$ :-S
When I got my first laptop for my 11th birthday I absolutely loved it. I took pictures every time I went out with my friends, every family event, I basically documented everything and saved every photo onto my laptop. I continued this for 3 years, 3 years of photos. My laptops keyboard started acting up not letting me type certain letters, and initially this wasn’t an issue, until one of the letters was apart of my password. After this happened, I could no longer access my computer and the only way to regain access was to completely reset my computer. I lost all the photos, all the school work, all the documents. It was completely crushing.
Being computer non savvy, when I get a prompt on my computer I click it. After my screen went blue , it prompted me to go back to factory settings. So I did. I lost all my Microsoft office, Norton, games , files everything I had paid for not 4 weeks before to be put on my Computer. You quickly learn when you stuff up.
Quite a few years ago I was asked to loan my laptop to run a presentation during a public exhibition in a government organization I worked in. As it was somewhat of a last minute and urgent request I agreed. Within hours I regretted my decision to do so, as my laptop was stolen! I lost all my files and hundreds of precious photos. Needless to say, that day I learned a very valuable lesson regarding the importance of backing up files!
To this day, I have idea how I managed it, but in trying to transfer data from my smartphone’s original Micro SD card to a new one with more storage space, I lost text messages from two close friends who had (then) recently passed away. I tried everything I could to get the texts back, to no avail.
I now have back-ups for apps such as Handcent SMS, but unfortunately, in this case, it was too little, too late. I’ve lost a lot of data over the years (floppy disc, HDDs, etc) and was gutted, but this was intensely personal and devastating. :'(
When my computer goes crazy. Just. What the. Get dell support. Fix lost a lot data
I have a 6 month gap with no photos of my eldest son due to be not backing up my computer after transferring photos from my phone and then deleting from my phone. Not happy
Oh man, I had the most amazing entry. It had drama, tension, humour, a love story, and a twist that nobody saw coming! It had it all. It was so good I was considering optioning the live-action rights, I envision it starring Ryan Gosling with Bryan Cranston as the antagonist. But as fate would have it, I had the entry saved on a usb stick and my dog ate it. I’m so sorry, you would have loved it.
I dropped a laptop into the toilet, whilst studying for a uni exam. I fished it out, but the damage was done…to both data and dignity.
I have had a few lap tops suddenly die on me, but the worst happened recently. My 3 year old Acer lap top got the ‘blue screen of death’ (suspiciously just after installing Windows 10) & I have lost all of my files, every single photo of my 2 kids & photo’s from our life in London (10 years living there and have moved back to Australia 18 months ago) & all of our trips we did (10 years worth) that I had saved to the lap top too. My husband kept telling me to back it up & I kept putting it off & have now lost everything, absolutely devastating. It seems to be a hard drive problem too, so it looks like nothing is salvageable.
Even when you’ve done everything right, installed Acronis back and verified the backups and restores work, Raid 1 the data drives, etc., I’ve still never been about to successfully restore Microsoft Outlook with all the previous emails, contacts and tasks. Never! Either lose contacts or tasks every time!?!
In the first week of a new job, and I accidentally deleted an entire table from the live database. The backup was restored when we noticed, but the missing records still had foreign key entries in other tables, and caused us headaches for weeks. Not the best way to start a new job…
A couple of years ago, I had my iphone stolen. I was philosophical about the data loss; photos, banking information, contacts were all gone. Then I realised that my phone had an app on it that was tracking my menstrual cycle and ovulation. The loss of this valuable information tipped me over the edge! I had PMT for weeks!
Work gives us Del laptops which I have to use under sufferance and whilst they will save my work when I am on the work server, when I am away, I have to save to my desktop or external hard drive. I have lost track of the number of times that I have lost all my data as the laptop constantly crashes and I have to wait for the IT admin to try and find it for me. I would love your product
Me and my husband started a digital diary 8 years ago. Everyday we wrote in it, thoughts and feelings, events, even what we had for dinner. It wasn’t until our iPad crashed that we knew we should’ve backed it up somehow. 8 years of daily updates gone, I still tear up thinking about it.
We’d just had a database upgrade and it was time for membership renewals, I thought there was a lot but was too busy to take notice, we’d sent out to every member ever, even the deceased! There were a lot of unhappy spouses, which was understandable.
Purchased an awesome new tower case to replace my old ugly looking one, took my time installing everything into it. Hooked it all back up, went to turn it on then wham! My whole 1 TB hard drive was wiped, because the stupid torch I used when installing everything was magnetic! I lost everything and was due to back up the next few days!
On a return trip from overseas business, I waited patiently for my luggage to a appear on the carousel. It didn’t. My suitcase with laptop aboard had disappeared from the cargo hold. No trace.
Lost the lot, including the external backup drive which you can’t carry into the cabin as a personal belonging because customs / security would impound it as “suspicious”!
About 10 years ago, as a tired uni student, I decided to free up space on my computer by deleting files. These included my entire iTunes library, a vast majority of documents, and lots of images. It took about an hour before I realised what I’d done… Still makes me feel sad and foolish when I think about it….
When my Grandmother passed I went to her viewing. Bending over the casket to pay my respects my iphone slipped out of my top pocket and somewhere into the casket.
I tried to be inconspicuous as i poked around looking for it but no luck. Other people from her nursing home were watching and staring – too embarrassed i left it there and walked off.. figuring i would come back and get it later.
Well Later never came.. next time i saw Nanna (2 days later) we were at the funeral. As they starting showing photos during the eulogy… her casket started ringing “Who let the dogs out”. People started yelling, arguing, screaming, and crying.
I had to dart outside, whisper to the minister, and wait for them to close the curtains so i could go around the back and recover my iphone 5. SIDE POCKET FROM NOW ON!
I lost all my phone contacts and photos on my Motorola XT5 smartphone. It happened when I got home from work. I change my clothes, forgetting I still had my phone in my pants pocket. My wife shortly after threw my work clothes in to the washing machine with out checking the pockets. I noticed my phone was missing, then I realised what had happened… I was not happy.
I’m a teacher and had thousands of hours worth of work – lesson plans, interactive lessons, assessment pieces etc. Beginning of a new school year, the day before the children came back to school, and I got the dreaded blue screen of death. Everything lost. I learnt the hard way about backing up.
Couple of years ago my external hard drive made a strange noise and before I could make a move it died, with years’ worth of photos, my portfolio of work, videos I made and lots of documents. I used a paid-for recovery program but it retrieved very little and I’m still sad!
Just before I went to live overseas, my grandfather said that if I wrote a book outlining my experiences living overseas for a year he would buy the first copy. And so I kept an electronic journal every day. Sadly after 6 months he passed away. I, however, kept journalling – and smiled whenever I thought of how happy he would be if he were alive. Whatsmore it was very therapeutic as I juggled life in a second culture, and so I enjoyed it.
Until one day after about 8 months when my mac failed to boot. And could never be fixed. And the data – including every day of my deepest thoughts and experiences which I had never backed up – was lost.
I stopped journalling 🙁
I am a shocker when it comes to backing up work
I worked at a small family business who developed Point of Sale software and was a technician.
My boss came over to me with his personal computer from home and asked me to plug in one of his other hard drives into it and set it all up. He was standing over my shoulder as I was doing it and I rested the hard drive on the metal chassis, right side up. It must have awkwardly landed on the metal chassis as part of the PCB touched and shorted, there was a quite loud “POP”. Anyway the hard drive was not reading and I must have fried the PCB.
My boss, who I could tell was seething (while trying not to show it) mentioned the majority of his sons Uni assignments were on the drive. He spent close to $1000 trying various recovery specialists to get the data back, I’m not sure he ever got the data back.
I felt horrible but he didn’t lay the blame all on me as he believed he was partly at fault for not backing it up. This was a big lesson for me, to not place hard drives or any electronic equipment in unsafe places (should’ve placed on an anti-static bag or something) and to always back up important data (or use cloud storage).
I went overseas as part of my uni degree, asked my computer technician dad to boot my computer up occasionally to keep it from dying. He didn’t. Came home to a very expensive paper weight and lost all my photos.
Marianne, is just too incompetent, to be assigned such intricately complicated tasks, involving sophisticated handling of business data – so much so, that such stuff-ups, have no matter!!!
My wife and I had our first child six months ago. We were lucky enough to have the nurse capture the first moment we laid eyes on him. 2 months later, I hadn’t made any back up copies of it, nor gotten it printed yet, our computer a serious malfunction, and we lost this photo, and a host of other precious photos and moments caught on film. Since then, I have been looking for a safe and reliable way in which to back up all of our family related data.
There once was a young girl called Kitty,
Who knew she was extraordinarily pretty.
As soon as she saw the camera come out,
She’d strike a pose, “cheese” she’d shout.
Then one day Kitty ran out of luck,
She grabbed the camera, tragedy struck.
It fell from her small clumsy hands,
On the hard tiled floor it lands.
The memory card now in small bits,
No more photo’s of my little Kits!
I work as a DJ covering private parties and nightclubs, for which during one fateful night my macbook decided to crash, and the hard drive could not be recovered, which lost a lot of data aswell as nearly 50k songs for my work, please forgive for for I had sinned and was young and didn’t do backups at all, I have since learnt about doing incremental backups if this is ever to happen again!
“Don’t wait too long to have children”, “children are fun’ they said. Well my adorable little cherubs were not my idea of fun, when one Sunday afternoon after having a brief toilet break (alone believe it or not!) I come back to my mobile phone to find my darlings had deleted all of my contacts and photos. It took me a “month of Sunday’s” to rebuild my database all over again with lots of important contacts lost forever.
As much as I love my husband I could have strangled him when he lost 6 years of photos and documents including our daughters first 4 years AND our wedding! all due to plugging the wrong cable into the hard drive and burning it out!
My sister is the practice manager for a medical office, when I started doing a business administration certificate I asked if I can come and just help to get some experience, I was meant to just file and do basic things, I took a phone call that required changing a date in the system for an appointment..i wrecked the whole system and all the dates changed, when trying to fix things by deleting I deleted the whole program…and the system crashed, I to this day have not admitted that it was me
Had an assignment due the next day and plenty of saved copies – all of them were in one place though, silly me. Blue screen of death and plenty of Chinese characters I gave up restoring my file and ended up submitting the assessment piece with a very… lacking reference list. Lucky I passed that one.
1. I deleted a wrong folder from Dropbox, luckily the sync does not run always and I was able to download the folder from their portal.
2. One of my External WD HDD has gone bad, I have tried using Ease US recovery, got the RAW files back however they show as corrupted whenever I try to open them. Tried a lot of different ways but no luck. At a loss of ideas.
After buying a brand new laptop which the salesman told me was the “V8” of laptops I spent 4 days collecting different companies data to set up a mailing list and putting it into a exel document, the computer crashed. I had to take the laptop back. They told me the hard-drive had crashed so I lost everything. As I had purchased product care they gave me a brand new replacement. It still didn’t make up for all the time I had spent getting all the data ready.
Spent hours ensuring all my videos and photos were safe on a portable Hard Drive. It’s a shame that the Scumbag that broke into my house also found it to be conveniently portable.
All I had was a laptop for my first computer and it didn’t have very big storage abilities and after having our first baby the memory was filling up fast from the many many pictures that we took of her! So one day I decided to clean it up and did a defrag (that’s as smart as I get with technology) and I remember something about my C: drive being full so I deleted it! And that happened to be absolutely everything I had on my computer!! I was devastated!
One of my work colleagues sent to me an email with an attachment of a calendar of firemen. Little did she know that she sent me a virus that would literally put my computer on fire!
A few years back, my younger brother thought it would be ‘funny’ to change my laptop password so I couldnt access anything. Unfortunately he also forgot the password he changed it to, along side writing gibberish in the password hint section. I lost absolutely everything. Sibling rivalry exhibit A
That’s easy. Turbo lister. I make a few extra dollars selling on eBay and use turbo lister to load items. I don’t know how many times I’ve lost all my listings because it’s crashed. It’s takes long enough taking pictures and uploading them that to lose them all plus descriptions and specifics is so time consuming. Just wish there was another similar program out there that is more stable but not yet.
Old school story, working in Asia 16 years ago, the cloud hadn’t been thought of yet, the hard drive on my laptop fried itself, lost everything except a few docs and presentations I’d “backed-up” to a CD. Hard lessons learnt.
I got sucked in by the Australia Post scam!
The trojan got in and bham!
Travel documents gone for a holiday that week,
I had to call an emergency geek!
Everything is twice backed up in our house. Unfortunately a month ago one of the back up drives started clicking. When I turned on the backup twin, it also clicked, being a recent replacement drive. Now for critical things, I back up a third time on the cloud.
In that year, CDs were still the main backup medium so I used one to back up all my pictures. I deleted all pictures from my hard disk because that was causing the computer to be very slow. When i went to check the CD, I could not access the pictures as the CD was not burnt correctly. So there you go .. Do not save anything on a CD, buy external hard drives!
I was bought a waterproof camera for Christmas 2014 especially to be used on my trip to Thailand in the new year. I was very safety to lock the latch and keep it all water tight… after two weeks of happy snapping on our last island while taking photos of my friends in the pool with a beautiful sunset the camera stops working and flashes with error messages. In a panic I turn it off and hope it will be fine when I put the memory card into my laptop.. but sadly this was not the case. After giving the memory card to the technies at work I had to give up on the idea of getting any of the photos recovered. They were all corrupt and lost forever! My friends were gutted as we’d used the waterproof camera instead of others so it help mostly all the pics which were irreplaceable. Sad times!
I couldn’t help myself but spend my Japan holiday behind my lens, as I knew I wanted to our capture the sights, sounds and experiences live and make a video of our trip. I ended up totally filling my micro 64GB SD. I have a dinosaur of an external, so I figured best save some kilograms and leave that beast at home and simply bring a spare micro SD. We had just arrived at our new airbnb and so I was in the laundry room with my luggage- figured I’ll do the SD switch into the adapter and be super efficient quickly throw some things in the washing machine before we went exploring- epic regret as I pulled my micro SD card and somehow let it escape my grip. One bounce off the tiles into the drain. TT_TT
I work as a cgi animator in film and TV, which at times is pretty cool. What’s not so cool is just how often scenes crash as work that are completely unrecoverable. Whilst a lot of the bigger film studios have ways to help bring back a lot of this data, the smaller TV studios often don’t. I remember working on a TV series once, in particular on this day I was working on a shot with about 12 background characters which makes even a solid machine lag like crazy. Suddenly, BLIP, everything was gone. No warning message, nothing. No proper backup system for me, just bye-bye! Tried reopening an old version of the shot but was getting a message telling me the scene was actually corrupt. Awesome. 3 days of work gone with a client deadline looming. Head-to-keyboard. Table-flip (ok….no table flip….but I was close). It’s no wonder our industry is known for its long hours – had a few late nights catching up on that shot again! The client certainly doesn’t care how much data you lose as long as they see the finished product on time! The life of an animator eh!
A photographer friend took photos of my 1 year old smashing their birthday cake.
After the photoshoot, my friend uploaded the photos from her camera onto her external hard drive. After uploading, her toddler tripped on the cords of the external hard drive and it fell hard on the ground. The hard drive would not start up after reattaching the power and USB cable!
When I heard about this incident, I also learned that my photographer had 8 other photoshoots on the hard drive including a christening and also a newborn! :S
I compose jingles as a part-time job. I store all my musical creations on the C drive of my PC, backing up my files weekly using ‘solfeggio’ inspired names, like ‘do’, ‘re’, ‘mi’, ‘fa’, ‘so’, ‘la’ and ‘ti’ with the system date. Just 7 months ago, I noticed that the PC (nicknamed ‘piano’) got a bit slow, regularly emitting ‘screechy’ sounds. As a non-technical person and struggling artist, I don’t have much funds to get external help. Under the pump to meet my deadlines, I desperately did a Google search on troubleshooting tips on ways to ‘fine-tune’ my pitchy PC. I downloaded a third party program from the friendly Internet called ‘Robomozart’. It scanned my PC for about 6 hours and detected AND automatically cleaned ‘suspicious’ files that could be causing the slowness. I clicked ‘Yes to all files’ when prompted earlier (a huge mistake). Unbeknownst to me, all my musical backup files were deleted from piano. I was left shattered and had to recall all my musical notes from my memory. Lesson learnt – never, ever store files on the C drive. It is off key!
I lost my father and a month later my laptop harddrive dies. I tried everything from testdisk to spinrite to linux rescue cds and could not get one photo off of that hard drive. It was utter devastation. My husband even paid a firm over $1000 to try and rescue the data but it was a lost cause.
Last night my laptop was about to die – when I plugged it in I blew a fuse (we were running 2 heaters, the dryer and oven… but my laptop pushed it over the edge).
So the computer is dying and Im running around trying to plug it in when I realise that the wifi was knocked out in the fuse bust too so I cant even save my stuff to the cloud as I watch my computer screen go dark.
Last time I take work home with me #keepworkatwork
I lost our wedding photos as I didn’t have them backed up and the computer died. Its very upsetting and disheartening knowing your special day, your once in a lifetime moment has completely been wiped with no way of getting it back
When I was about 12 my family made a trip back to my parents home country to visit my increasingly frail grandfather. We had just purchased our very first digital camera and used it the entire trip to take photos with him by his bedside and record all the extended family gatherings in the new exciting digital format. On the plane home my dad let me play with the camera and spent time searching through and testing all the Settings in the menu; amazed at what things I could change at a push of a button. I unfortunately also learnt you could reformat a card and without thinking I had erased all photos of our trip and the last photos of my grandfather. He passed away soon after that and we never recovered the photos. Now I shoot film.
The Business Chamber I lead had used LocalSmile as it’s website provider and social network. I am sure there are many other Business Chambers around Australia that used LocalSmile also. We had several years of posts and interactions with our association members on the network. Last month the LocalSmile website went down and staff didn’t answer emails or phone calls. Without notice, LocalSmile’s owners shut up shop and we lost everything! I’ve had to quickly create a new site before Google’s robots index the error page.
Kept years and years of data & photos moving them from HDD to HDD, kept telling myself one day I would get around to backing up the important stuff but always put it off because I had to sort through every thing, only problem was that more and more stuff was going on to the HDD. Then it happened last month, HDD failure, 10+ years of photos and saved files that I had moved to that HDD about 3 years ago and didn’t keep the old ones. Gone…. I purchased a replacement PCB to try to fix it… no luck. It is the worst, baby photos, honeymoon photos.
I once used Acronis True Image to back up my main hard disk. The end result was a total disaster. The old hard disk would no longer boot up. I tried twice emailing Acronis for help but no reply and the only solution in the end was to erase the partition and reinstall windows. Acronis is pathetic.
I recently had to have the hard drive of my laptop sent to a specialist data recovery agent at the cost of $1100 after I dropped it resulting in the laptop ceasing to function. This laptop stored irreplaceable photos and I had no recent backup. If I had an easy to use backup solution I would have avoided a costly mistake.
Was the winner of this ever announced?