On my last crash we did surgery on the drive similar to what others have done and was able to get some stuff off so I’ve learned to keep anything important in 1 folder so its easier to get it all at once if I ever have to do that again.

With the smaller hard drive I have to back up pictures and files often to keep space free. I burn all pictures to CD on a yearly basis. All my current pictures are on a web site. Important documents end up on a web server or my flash drive as a back up.

I also re-format my hard drive every couple of years to get rid of the stuff I don’t use any more (games, programs).

I’m going to break my own rule here soon – I’m going to get a large 250G external drive to put music on. I really don’t want to loose that one but I hope with it being a seldom used drive it will last longer.

Well, as you can see coming, the hard disk crashed. We were really screwed. I thought it couldn’t hurt anything, so I took the drive apart and watched it start up and fail. (I didn’t open the platter area, just the head controller area) I could see the head moving back and forth trying to find track 0. I figured the optical sensor went bad and off to the electronic supply store I went. The part I found was similar, but didn’t really fit. I wired it in and held it in place with my little finger. It didn’t work, but I kept trying. About the 30th try, it worked! I held as still as I could and the other engineer copied stuff off as fast as he could. We got the design and about half of everything else before something moved and it stopped working. We never got it to work again.

Backups must be on another media!!!

I had to replace my power supply and graphic card this year, but other than that, I always back up my files onto flash drives and CDs every year. If anything, I reformat every once in a while (maybe like every 2 years). For some unfortunate reason, a semester’s worth of work (which has been zipped) had been corrupted…it was considered my proudest semester, *sigh*.

Jason – I completely understand the feelings you are going through right now. A few months back my husband and I had to move 2+ hours away. During the whole ride, I was crammed with another person in the “extended cab” of my brother-in-law’s Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. (“Extended cab” = more like 1 1/2 cab, with teeny seats that flip down.) Anyhow, I *refused* to allow my PC to ride anywhere but crammed in the back with me. I cradled it the whole way, smashed up against the back of the passenger seat. My family thought I was nuts for insisting that the climate-controlled cab was much better for my ‘baby’.

*Runs off to backup hard drive*

Once I pulled an all-nighter working on a paper for some class, and got to a point where the documents disk was full. I was on a roll, and my 8am class was a mere four hours away, so I pressed on, thinking I’d finish the paper, track down another blank disk to write the document to, print it out and be off to class. When 7:30 rolled around, I still wasn’t done, but needed to get rolling anyway; the paper wasn’t for my first class so I figured I’d print it later. When I wasn’t able to find a new disk, I just left the machine on, figuring that it would be ok. What’s the worst that could happen?

About an hour after I left, my wife woke up, and noticed as she walked by the computer that I had forgotten to turn it off. So she did. Ouch. My paper evaporated.

That was pretty early in our marriage, and thankfully we realized that a paper (and four hours of work) were pretty miniscule in the big scheme of things, and now we can laugh about the incident. I was able to get a reprieve from my prof, picked up the doc from my last save, and was able to finish it in just a couple of hours (amazing what difference being well rested makes.)